Johnathan Armstrong

Born in 1964, Jonathan Armstrong is an artist, print maker and sculptor, graduating with a Fine Art Degree at Newcastle Polytechnic in the mid 1980’s, focusing on sculpture, before returning to art education under Programme Leader and artist Nick Steward to complete his Masters Degree in Fine Art at Winchester School of Art in 2020.

Influenced by Doris Salcedo, Jannis Kounellis, Ellsworth Kelly, Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg with his notion of the ready made or “Gifts from the Streets”, as Rauschenberg called it, in making art. Old newspaper articles, abandoned furniture and domestic relics become charged with significance and saturated with meaning in Armstrong’s art.

The unwanted, redundant and obsolete have become his obsession, like fragments of time, measured, catalogued and immortalised. His prints, collages and schematic assemblages transform these obsolescent items into poignant and commanding testimonies of loss and remembrance.

By cataloguing the things we throw away, Armstrong hopes to draw attention to the environment we live, while asking the viewer to reconstruct stories, sparking memories that question the fragility of their own life.