JOHN COURT

London born and Finland based resident artist John Court graduated from Camberwell School of Art, London, in 1994 and from Norwich School of Art and Design in 1997 with a 1st class Honours degree in Sculpture.

John Court’s artistic practices explore the physical and psychological limits of his own body. With the performance as his proceeding, Court seeks to approach certain personal experiences from his childhood and present day.

In his performances, he always follows a similar pattern: the body as the main element, time and the interrelationship of performance with other disciplines, mainly writing and drawing. Court finds drawing very important in his artistic practice since it brings together elements of line, movement, space and time.

It is usual for the spectator to witness Court pushing objects in a clockwise direction or writing and drawing to exhaustion, not doing it in the most comfortable way, but putting himself in situations committed to physical weary and discomfort. This interest in introducing certain graphic motifs, words, strokes, responds to the intention of the artist to reflect on language. It occupies a very particular place in the history of his life: unable to read or write because of his early dyslexia, he decided to leave the school until he could work in the field of art after learning to read and write in his own way.

This is why we can see modified versions of familiar objects encountered throughout his education such as desks, dictionaries, pencils, and paper in order to support the artist’s actions, referring to the difficulties he encountered along his education. The duration of many of his performances is 8 hours in reference to the 8-hour workday of manual labour he went through in the past, having worked on building sites in and around London for many years before he started in art. The elements he uses to hint alienation and solitude, references Court’s experience of living in rural Lapland, unable to speak, read or write in the native language.

In this way, John Court’s set of artistic practices works as a personal testimony to a complex life in which the relationship with language, the basic code for communication, among other issues, has been intricate and punishing.

John Court’s work has captivated audiences worldwide at events such as the Performance festival in Gdansk Poland (2017), Beijing Live – At the Danish Cultural Center and Institut Goethe in Beijing, China (2016), Oui Performance York in UK (2016), New Performance Festival in Turku, Finland (2016), Arctic Action Art Live Performance Art Festival in Longyearbyen, Norway (2016) or the Drawing Triennial National Museum in Wroclaw, Poland (2015).