Alastair Levy

I work with photography, video, painting and sculpture to explore the forms, colours and materials of everyday life. This might include working with sound archives to create installations about migration, breathing new life into found objects connected with notions of ‘home’ or salvaging old photographs from the realms of advertising and commercial photography. My work is shaped by the relationship between industrial production and domesticity as well as by the histories of minimalism, conceptual art and graphic design. The materials that I use - domestic cast-offs and images from the middle-past - are imbued with use and life; of the person that they belonged to, or who made them, and of their original function and meaning. I try to amplify these qualities through a process of appropriation and transformation into something new and unexpected.  

I have a wide range of life experiences and knowledge of other forms of work. I lived in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery for 6 months in my early 20s - teaching English as a foreign language to young monks near Darjeeling, India. I worked as a personal enabler to a man with cerebral palsy providing round the clock assistance for his daily living needs. I have taught photography at all levels from GCSE to Higher Education over the last 15 years.