Piers Secunda (b.1976)

Piers Secunda is a British painter and sculptor whose research-heavy practice examines the deliberate destruction of culture. While at art college in London in the 1990s, Piers scarcely could have imagined that he would one day be so intimately involved with the history and traditions of places as distant and dangerous as Kabul or Mosul. Yet these are among the destinations to which a long-time interest in the contexts and consequences of cultural desecration has led him. Piers recalls witnessing on television the destruction by the Taliban in 2001 of the Buddhas of Bamyan in Afghanistan, just months before the 11 September attacks in New York: “It felt like a domino rally was starting; since then we’ve lived in a different dynamic of society. We now have a different outlook and a different degree of self-awareness in terms of cause and effect.” Piers’s focus on such cause and effect, in a geopolitical sense, dovetails with his endeavour to express, as an artist, the personal, emotional experience of visiting places that have suffered in this way. More recently, those places have been the many religious and cultural sites attacked by ISIS over the last few years, where in some cases the damage is ongoing, as Piers reminds us: “Destruction of culture happens on many levels; it can be a single devastating moment, or it can occur incrementally like water dropping on a stone.”

The central idea underpinning Piers’s artistic work is that a flat surface restricts too much for his liking what painting can be: “The complexities of our modern world are too great to be illustrated on a two dimensional surface,” he explains. “I decided I could not be restricted by the parameters of a surface, and began casting, carving, and manipulating the structural integrity of paint to make things that can expand in any direction.” This is enabled by the use of the correct materials, which Piers can exploit to his ends as part of a modernist practise he sees as “directly referential to geopolitics and happenings in the world.” He feels an emotional obligation to attempt to express what it feels like to visit sacred and historic sites that have been left in ruins. In Mosul, for example, he took with permission from a local priest a small cardboard box containing charcoal from a burnt-out building, and used this very charcoal, reduced to ink, to produce his work Mosul Museum Ruins. The work ISIS bullet-hole painting (Assyrian horse), meanwhile, is made predominantly from plaster casts of Assyrian reliefs. Three fragments together illustrate the destruction of these beautiful symbols of Assyrian culture by ISIS bullets, as if in an animation. “I wanted to show in some respects the tragedy of the erasure of these important cultural objects”, Piers explains.

Today Piers is particularly astute on the role of the artist in international advocacy: “Artists have the capacity to express in clear terms the needs of humanity, and as messengers, artists are capable in ways politicians may not be. They are capable of producing a message with a compelling delivery behind it – and it is important that it is passed on.” He has previously been asked to organise a collaborative event to help foster relations between the Iraqi ambassador to the UK and the Kurdish Regional Government, and he is proud that his work has had this tangible diplomatic effect – another aspect of his career he would not have foreseen all those years ago in art college.

“I wanted to show in some respects the tragedy of the erasure of these important cultural objects”, – Piers Secunda