Artists Statement for Mr H Haut
The works of Mr Herbert Haut are concerned with the creation of identity and devices individuals use to project their identity to the outside world.
The collages developed from work started in Sheffield prior to moving to Pembrokeshire. In 2006 Sheffield was a scruffy Northern English town with a rich Industrial, political and cultural history and a vibrant artistic community. Artists such as Kev Grey, Kid Acne and Phlegm were starting to gain notoriety. Geographically remote Haut’s photographing and documenting of vinyl stickers, incongruous to rural West Wales , was a way of maintaining a visual connection, if in subject matter only, with these distant practitioners.
Early collections of photographs displayed images of stickers in a relatively formal manner. In later sets presentation of the photograph became a concern, with the shape of the image often referencing the shape of the sticker itself.
In ‘Alibi’ the documenting became an intrinsic part of the work. People, whose identity was hidden, were asked to pose with a piece of ‘vandalism’ in shot and asked to complete the sentence “I come here”. The end product speaks as much about human behaviour as presentation of evidence.
