Meet the artists from our graduates support programmes: Tom Motley

For this new series, Maariya Daud, who is undertaking a placement at Castlefield Gallery, interviewed the artists from our graduates support programmes. Today we are meeting Tom Motley.

Tom Motley is one of the 2023-24 Manchester School of Art Castlefield Gallery Graduate Mentees. His work makes you stop and think. Blending traditional techniques with an irreverent approach, his engagement with materials and culture feel liminal and slightly inimical, though alluring in their brutality.

Who have you been mentored by to date, what do you like about them?

I have been mentored by Simon O’Sullivan, an artist and theorist working at Goldsmiths. We had some great conversations. It was good to talk to someone who instantly got what I was making and where my work was coming from.

Who (or what) has been the biggest influence on your art to date – and its style?

It’s hard not to say the internet, being young and being part of a world of evolving aesthetics and thought, part of a collective consciousness. Other than that world, I don’t think I’d make art the way I do without Hito Steyerl, Gene McHugh, Mark Fisher or Deleuze. Also, big up Nancy Keegan.

What is your most successful work of yours to date? Was there a long process behind it, a thought process perhaps?

pissinginthewind/shoutingintothevoid. It started while looking at a billboard in a smoking area in Chorlton wanting to disrupt the space. Then, during a bout of houselessness and living with some commercial photographers, Lewis Hancock and Victoria Chetley took photos of me recreating some saccharine images of Justin Bieber from 2009. These then got overlayed with found online and archive imagery and a phone number. Months later I purchased temporary space on the same billboard, £220 for the 2 weeks it was there. You could call the phone number, and an AI version or Justin Bieber’s voice would give credit to Victoria and redirect you to my website. Funnily it wasn’t until I spent all that time and money that I realized it was about digital commerce through the personal; talking through the imagery and Justin Bieber as this commodified feminine youth. What worked great about it was that people I know and don’t came across it, some pilgrimed there, others didn’t believe the online posts about it were real.

Do you think you had a decisive moment where you realised what your art style was?

Not really, things and interests kind of naturally evolved. The most I could think of is this project I made where I created this fake almost Brain rot, content slop, computer-generated podcast of TikTok. There was a clutch moment where a mentor asked me if I wanted to accurately produce this form of commercial clean look and instead, I decided to lean it to the dirt. more interested in producing a familiar but eerie reality than just inhabiting something direct.

How do you feel about your art now, compared to a year ago? How has the mentorship programme changed the way you view your art?

I think as every year passes, I know more and more about what I’m doing in my work. Compared to a year ago I feel confident with the experimental body of work that I’ve produced and understand what they mean to me personally. I’ve shown Myself, to an extent. But no matter though, I’ve still got fight in me and more to prove.

What would you say is/was your biggest artistic or personal challenge – has the mentorship programme helped you to confront and remedy this?

I was homeless for the start of the mentorship so that was pretty intense. I later got a place to live, and a studio. I could get peace of mind and start making more art. It demonstrated two tangents of my work, these being more ethereal works that disseminate mostly through technology and material interactions that inhabit physical space. I think the mentorship allowed me to work through different aspects of these modes and where they fit in my practice.

What are your plans after the programme? How has it shaped who you are, and where you want to take your art?

I’ve got a Solo show in April at Horsfall in Manchester, so I’ve been heavily working on that and some more projects and exhibitions coming this year that I can’t mention yet. The goal is to keep making art and furthering conversation. I want to infect new modes and find new distribution models and ways of engaging.