Talking Therapy - Art, Science, Tech and Burnout With Mark Burden

Transcript

Welcome to the Art Against Mental Illness podcast. My name is Alex Loveless and this is my podcast about the healing powers of art for artists, art lovers, the art curious and anyone with an interest in mental health and well-being. Hi everybody, this is my interview with my old friend Mark Burden who’s an artist who works across multiple different mediums in multiple different spaces. We have a wide-ranging conversation about art, science, maths and technology and we talk about stuff like Alan Turing, AI, Beauty and the Mandane, creating artworks across multiple mediums and metaphysics of walking and Christmas cards. For those of you listening to this in the future, this was recorded just before Christmas 2024 so the Christmas references were at the time of recording and original publishing, festive and time of year appropriate. I’m sorry if you decided to listen to this in the middle of summer. I videoed this interview so there’s a video version on YouTube if you would prefer to watch it that way. I’ll put a link in the show notes for that. Otherwise please remember to like, share, rate, review and tell some people about this podcast and I’ll see you next time. I’m here with Mark Burden, an old friend of mine. I think we’ve known each other for I think about five years. We were both a member of an art group in Windsor in the UK called the Windsor Art Collective, formerly known as the But Is It Art group. Me and Mark bonded on a love of sort of technology in the crossover with art, a reverence for Alan Turing and a general fetish for square artworks. We’ve kept in touch. I’ve since moved out to Scotland. Mark’s still in Windsor and so I’m just going to hand over to Mark to introduce himself. Yeah well first of all thank you very much Alex for inviting me to your Art and Creativity for Mental Health podcast. It’s a pleasure to be here and I just love what you’re doing. To introduce myself, being a creative within an ecosystem, whether it’s corporate or whether it’s within the art world and whether it’s just in our personal lives is really important and I think creativity gives us a lot and we give a lot to our creative processes and so it’s a question of you know what do artists do. I do consider myself an artist. I’ve been an artist for many years and thinking back to the initial inspiration it was stuff I did with my mum before I went to school you know it’s kind of like drawing in a little A4 pad and just making kids drawings and it’s kind of like being a habit and practice that I’ve stuck with more or less ever since and I’ve gone to formal art education you know both in the past when I was a kind of like late teenager and just recently in the last last few years and you know part of my life journey has been around mental health well-being and part of my life journey has been around mathematics and logic and part of my life journey has been around this this art practice that I have and being very interested in the connections and interconnections between art technology and your mental and imaginative space. Amazing and so I noted from one of your bios that you you have an MA in art and science. MA in art and science you know I did a practice graduate course for two years it was a part-time course I was working full-time within an IT role which is essentially new service technology development so it’s kind of like leading edge leading edge stuff on the technology side but trying to make sure that it interacts well with people and their life and gives them value and at the same time was very interested and really this is a story since the covid lockdown where you’re kind of like forced to look at your life and think about what you’re doing and very interested in this kind of like tech art science interrelationship because that’s kind of where my life was at in terms of my life journey and figuring out that there were courses out there on the art side that kind of like looked to that cross section into intersection of art and science and so I applied to do an MA just a fine art MA at Central St Martin so I did two years studying art and science and doing my own thing so it was great. I mean from my perspective that’s incredible I’ve had many abortive attempts at getting a degree and and sort of the intersection of the two sides of my world are very like yours it’s on one side science and technology and maths and logic on the other side it’s art and you know creativity and I think we approach combining those things in a very different way. Not always there is definitely some overlap but do you want to tell us how that manifests in your art? Yeah I mean I think I do two things one is I’m very intuitive so I try not to think before I do anything and I don’t tend to have an interest or an end destination as I start out I have a kind of like a set of ingredients in my my cookbook visual or mental motifs that I want to play with and they have a particular meaning to me as well as maybe resonate with other people. I realize Mark that we haven’t even covered what what your art actually is so let’s just rewind a bit because you know you’ve got quite a unique approach for your art. Can you just describe that? Yeah let me let me just say a few words about my artistic practice because my artistic practice these days is really about what I consider a number of themes one is the everyday the other is a kind of like maths and science element and then the other part so kind of like machines surveillance technology and the other is poetry so I kind of mash them all up together to create work and in terms of how I do that I might use traditional means so I could use drawing or collage or you know painted elements but most of the time I’m using applications you know art applications on my iPad to to make images and sometimes those images stay as digital images and sometimes they stay as little clips you know little video clips and sometimes they develop into prints or portfolios of prints or boxes of prints or performance of boxes of prints or or or longer videos kind of like assemblages of clips reels and static images you know which are shown on a video screen so that that’s a lot about the kind of the media I’m using typically my work is small to I would say medium size so for me large size would be something like three foot by three foot and it kind of like ranges in size I’m quite interested in the way things move from micro to macro and scale scale up I really like my large work large so if I was doing projected work and projected images they could be the size of a house and you know there are particular thematics and annex you touched on some of those you know one is an interest in Turing’s work another is an interest in Dante’s poetry and then I’ve got an interest I’ve been kind of obsessed with over the course of the last 12-18 months which is related to Turing’s and imitation game an intelligence test for machines that relates to AI and how we as humans are developing alien intelligence and so you know I’ve been incredibly intrigued with that at the same time my practice is kind of is grounded in my everyday and my everyday has been for the last four or five years something that’s related to chronic fatigue syndrome and also to do with just recently you know the diagnosis was changed to burnout so again that gives me a kind of like a perspective of of life which where where art plays a particular role so creating art may not be completely therapeutic but does have therapeutic aspects to both the artistic encounter with the viewer and also to the artist when they’re where when they’re working so hopefully that gives you a little bit more view of what my art practice is like when I asked most people well you do art what do you do and they go oh I do all painting or what would you paint or like landscapes or something right and and that’s pretty good I’ve got a good way of uh you know triangulating it could still be quite a broad ray of stuff but the arts is pretty simple right I know what you do but I think if people were listening to this after that description which was a very very detailed and adequate description of what you do I’m still not sure they would know right because your art is quite distinct and I think the closest I can come is collage but collage that spans multiple mediums and in the real world in the digital world and I think if you looked at your instagram account you’re in and your your sort of digital work is very very well suited to Instagram because it’s almost all square and and so the tiled Instagram profile view always looks incredible but if you looked at that you would very much conclude you’re a digital artist and I love the idea that it spills out into every domain and so how do you how do you sort of link all that together I mean how do you see it in terms of say a series of artworks when it when it spans perhaps physical media digital and things like installations and multimedia that type of thing typically because I’m working in themes I work in probably my work is probably project based and therefore there’s an element of sequence and series to the stuff that I do and that that work can take different forms and it’s really as simple as that so probably the easiest example I can give is working through Dante’s Divine Comedy which is I was was attracted to it during Covid because I thought although I can’t travel physically I can travel in a mental space and I wonder what it would be like if Dante was right and all the modern scientists were wrong you know it’s just like we will end up in the circles of hell and purgatory and the celestial realms so it was it was kind of like an interested in cutting-edge science and philosophy of the medieval times combined with Dante’s love of numbers and structure and discipline in terms of how he was forming kind of squares squares of poems you know so his whole cycle is is based around 10 by 10 or there’s a hundred canto’s and so you’ve got all of these squares so I was kind of like interested in the math side as much as the science side but I needed to make sure I wasn’t thinking about the sequence in a way that wasn’t giving me a fresh insight and so I took took each poem so each of the 100 canto’s you know little poem songs that Dante wrote and just did a work based around that canto not knowing the whole cycle although understanding that you know you kind of like move move from a dark place to a level of enlightenment and the work came out of that and it took different forms I mean it took print form it took book form it took video form it took spoken word and image and it was really a combination as you say Alex of collaged elements that or you know it’s photo collage it’s collage and they could be completely disparate so the idea was to make as many disparate things fit into some kind of harmonious sequential whole and you know see what happened and go on that journey and let other people join that journey as well incredible and did other people join that journey I showed the the image and spoken word stuff within a lockdown British artist book fair event in Bristol and someone got their hands on it and he turned out to be a poet who was doing his own new modern version of the divine comedy and so I’ve been doing some work to to go alongside some of his poems as he’s been going on that journey and that’s been a joy to be part of you know to work with a living living collaborator rather than someone who’s unfortunately passed away like Dante had that’s incredible I love it and in terms of the words that go with your images because again if we sort of think about the Instagram it’s a very visual medium and a lot of people won’t notice the words on a place like Instagram but obviously I’ve seen various of your books publications your regular Christmas cards which I’ll come back to and so the words seem to me that they are quite important to your artworks and do you want to do you want to elaborate on that a bit yeah I mean the the kind of the word thing I’ve just always been fascinated with and I’m also interested in just the sounds of words so again within my practice the two most recent sequences one has been an AE sequence which is all around the the atrocity exhibition which is a book written by JG Ballard which he started in the 1960s and he used a kind of like a collage process which Burroughs used as well you know in terms of just cutting up the text and seeing where it went and I was using a similar process to create images that were inspired by the atrocity exhibition I condensed that down to the the AE sound so hey you know is it a scream is it a cry for help is it just a sound and that created you know that that kind of work created me the opportunity to to investigate yeah video image and this is work that I did at Central St. Martin’s video image static image word spoken word and also text word so printed word and image and and performative aspects of that so mixing it all up and the the word part for me is is sometimes it’s very very factual so we can use words in a very factual way so non-fiction and sometimes it’s it’s more of a a cut-up process where it may just be you know repetitions of words or a more poetic play on words and somehow they resonate so a title will resonate with an image and it can can spin your mind into different areas and I think the dadaists were great at using words to destabilize the image that we were seeing to it to a certain extent it may appear normal then you look at the title and you wonder what’s going on and it creates a different mental space so it creates a kind of like psychic resonance that takes you to different mental space than you would do in terms of your normal encounter with the everyday and I think that’s what I’m looking for I just love that there’s a few things that spring to mind with what you just said one of them is Brian Eno and his cut-up technique with artists like Bowie I think Radiohead also did similar things and then for the um what was the last thing you said it’s gone from my mind what was the last thing you just said um god this is good like ADHD to the max today anyway um yeah oh no it was the um no it was the taking you to different mental space so it was the um the oak tree can’t remember the artist have you come across the oak tree before no it might still be in the take modern but I guess it could be anywhere is literally a glass of water on a on a glass shelf set about six foot off the ground or something and uh and there’s a piece of text that goes with it about why this glass of water is an oak tree which deals directly with the the themes that you’ve been discussing there and and sort of goes to the very core of the the thesis of modern art uh especially since the Dadais but I don’t think they were quite the first to it but they were the first to call it out explicitly um and I just love that side of things and you know I’m sort of getting more and more into abstract so that’s sort of becoming uh a bit more of a theme for me so I really think that’s all absolutely fascinating and I could talk about it all day um just want to come back to your experience uh going back to uni um quite late in life you know obviously you’d been doing art for quite a long time before that and you had a career and so on and so how did you find that experience did you how do you think it sort of changed you to develop you as an artist and and sort of why you know given that you did it quite late in life but what was the motivation there were you were you is it was it a mature course were you mixed with younger folks too no I mean it’s interesting probably in terms of the the breakdown you know there were probably about 10 who were old older more mature students you know so when I say old I mean like 50s plus then of course you had a wide range because it’s an ma you weren’t having you’re having people in their 20s but mainly I would say the group a group of people would be in their 20s and 30s so everyone was coming to the programming in quite a mature way so there were probably more women in fact there were more women than men on the course as you’d find in mainly mainstream art education in the UK you know everyone was coming from a different background so you had people that were not practicing artists originally but had an interest in art and were wanting to develop a visual communication to uh you know some of the stuff that they were doing in the past you know whether it was from a more purely scientific background or whether it was a scientific administration or anything like that so a wide range of different career paths for people that were mainly in the 20s to 40s and so how do you think that affected your art practice I think it just why widen it up when you’re exposed to different things I mean you know the rule of thumb that I took was I don’t want to do what I’ve done before at art school yet again you know so it wasn’t a question of thinking well I’ve done this and I’ll do a bit more of it it was just like being open to the experience of doing something different and seeing what that different turned out to be so my rule of thumb was if I’ve done something like this before uh you know I should cross it off my list of things to do now that was part and parcel of it the second part was as I started the course I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue so I thought you know can I do a full-time job and do this at the same time and the answer was probably you know the the simple logical answer was probably be no but I carried on doing it because I wanted to do it then I had COVID in in the um the first year that was there in the March term the spring term and that just completely whacked me out so I had post-COVID symptoms and only thing that I was planning to do just got put on the back burner and um it forced me to think about stuff in a different way you know when you’ve got COVID and when you’ve got chronic fatigue you can’t really think about art in the same way you know your brain is not really able to process that much and so you have to kind of like concentrate on uh getting from the bed to the sofa and then back again and and having enough nutrition in the day but when I was doing that I couldn’t watch TV couldn’t read a book but what I could do was just look out the window and draw what was in front of me and that’s what I ended up doing you know so I had a whole series of um surveillance images that weren’t ready to do with art school but were ready to do with what my everyday life was was like at the time just looking out the window and probably that was that was about it and um I developed that by looking at you know bits of my everyday life under a microscope and doing micros you know drawings of what I could see under the microscope as well so it’s just just really exploring what my everyday was uh but you’re looking at that from a an academic perspective as well so having to think about uh writing a thesis writing an essay which was a topic of choice and my topic of choice was really the intelligence of machines through Alan Turing’s work and uh also through Marcel Duchamp’s uh Dadaist work you know the large glass which is an image a strange image on glass which shows intelligent machines communicating with each other and having emotions between each other as well the male and female female uh machines so there was there was a lot of stuff going on and I think you just mix things up and go to places that you wouldn’t go otherwise because you’re talking to people and meeting people and seeing different things from what you would do normally but on the other side a lot of the stuff was really grounded in my everyday and um the atrocity exhibition inspired work was really just as much about me watching tv images you know tv images about JFK and um doing some research on some of that stuff the visual kind of like over stimulation of what we see on tv. Crazy um it really really is interesting and I remember a lot of your you know your black and white digital images just of bits of stuff you’ve seen outside the window and stuff and honestly that was my favorite of your stuff ever I absolutely loved it and uh just this idea of the sort of the haunting mundanity you know liminal spaces and and just that you know uh suburban life uh in the surveillance culture and all these things and you can read so much into them and and you can take them however you want but I found them really haunting right I did but like in a sort of beautiful way and I you know I think they’re incredible and um and they look great in a big grid. Yeah they they they do look really great I mean and again uh those images probably haven’t been seen that much you know so a lot of the work I do doesn’t really get seen as much as I like it to and I like the idea of big grids I’m thinking about how to do those kind of installations online in a virtual space because sometimes it’s difficult to get the the physical space but you can still get an impression and you can still use that to um you know manifest a physical space to put the stuff in and so the black and white work the observational work you know I would call that as a surveillance theme and uh you know sometimes that’s inside the house or inside an environment and sometimes it’s just walking around and seeing what what happens so that’s kind of part of my practice you know observing what’s around the in the everyday and thinking about the stuff that people don’t typically post is um a stuff of worthy on Instagram so there’s a level of banality about it you know it’s the everyday banal. Yeah and that’s such juxtapose to all the um selfies in front of the Taj Mahal or whatever people are doing um which which gets you know that’s what’s become mundane um and what’s interesting is the stuff that people don’t spend any time looking at and I um and so your your grids of squares you know were a huge influence on me um I was just mesmerized by the uniformity of it but the the stories you could tell with with sort of slightly anonymous you know individual pictures that stand alone tell one story that put together tell a completely different story and uh and so I you know I started as you’ve seen doing a whole bunch of square artworks myself at varying sizes I did manage to make a physical grid yeah I literally built it I yeah I built it afterwards because if I tried yeah if I try to hang them like I just couldn’t get them to even on hanging wise I couldn’t get them to hang in a sort of in a nicely geometric um well spaced way so I built a couple of frames and managed to get them up on the wall in uh the exhibition I did in the in the cinema next door to me that was that was actually a in part a homage to you mark so there you go well thank you very very much altered to the work of mark burden well I mean it was just a wonderful grid and I just love seeing it Alex and I thought you know independent of my influence or lack of influence on your work I mean it was just a super piece of work and I think um when we’re looking at grids and uh we could talk about grids probably for a week if we wanted to you know there’s something that’s um that’s particular to the human condition about grids you know as soon as you see a straight line you know a human’s been around and uh you know as soon as you see a grid you also know a human’s been around and what we see within our social media what we’re seeing uh within any kind of you know technology media is a series of grids and um I think it’s just part of our commonplace part of our contemporary every day something that uh would not have been usual for anyone apart from folks living in the 21st century yeah don’t get me started right I’ve got grids now um I’m going for grids on my podcast so so talking about um our art reflecting each other’s we’ve both depicted Alan Turing uh I’ve I’ve only done it once uh but you have lots uh but the funny thing about my depiction of Alan Turing in a slightly meta and recursive way actually includes one of your pictures of Alan Turing as part of the collage behind the portrait um we’ve both got I think a healthy reverence of the I guess what would you call him the godfather grandfather of computing or the progenitor of computing and I think that you know it was obvious those those two things were going to be combined with people like us my Turing painting uh is housed on a wall of a couple of IT nerds in Sydney Australia which I find quite an amusing concept what are your thoughts on Alan Turing you know he turns up in your work basically everywhere he’s kind of in you know even if he’s not appearing directly he’s in the background and um probably if I’d have known about Alan Turing when I was at high school I would have focused more on mathematics than art you know that that’s how powerful Turing’s influence is on me and um one of the things I was really fortunate to do following and being part of the um a central St. Martin’s in art and science was to to get a collaboration with University of Durham and the the Bioscience Institute up there and then they paired me up with a mathematician called Andrew Kraus who’s developed this wonderful app that’s based around Turing’s mathematical model for morphogenesis so the kind of like the things that we see in nature you know you could see stripes on a zebra and and you know why do they morph in the way they do you could look at in zebra fish as well you know this little fish that kind of like dart around the ocean but you know this kind of like to stop you for a bit there so morphogenesis can you just elaborate on what that means for our less scientifically orientated listeners I’m not able to understand the maths of Alan Turing so Alan Turing was really fascinated by why nature is like it is and he thought there was a mathematical principle underneath a lot of nature and when when you see the picture that his mum did as a little drawing as mum did when Alan Turing was at school he was uh supposed to be in a hockey match and there you can see his mum drawing him looking and staring at the daisies and he was probably doing something like counting the petals or something daft like that but he was absolutely fascinated by this link to numbers in nature and you can see it in the Fibonacci series so the Fibonacci series is where you get two numbers in the sequence you start out all one and one you add them together to get two and then you take two and the last number in the sequence one and then equals three so Alan Turing was always fascinated by Fibonacci in this number series that you know when you look at it it’s one one two three five eight thirteen twenty one and so on and it’s the same theorem that you can see in the golden section you see it in Leonardo’s work you see it in a lot of the Renaissance work where they did figured out what one single point perspective was and on what this golden section was and it’s it you know it’s essentially it’s the harmonics of our face it’s the harmonics of the natural world so Turing was really interested in this and he met up with a lady that’s in the imitation game film Joan Clark as she was at the time you know they had discussions in their Bletchley Park breaks where they were cracking the code of the German enigma but they were talking about cracking the code of nature in terms of mathematical modeling and so more for Genesis as a way of doing mathematical modeling to nature and Turing was first looking at something very very simple and so you’ve got things like Frisian cows you know the cows with the black and white patches over them and he spent an incredible amount of time trying to figure out what the mathematical calculation and formula was for why those cow shapes were kind of like randomized so instead of just being spots they were kind of like abstract splurgy spots and that really is my simple story around what morphogenesis is. That is so cool and I’m now not going to look at cows the same way again but I guess back to your original comment about zebra stripes and so I’m assuming that all zebra stripes are different like a fingerprint and and like the iris of the human eye and so on and of course there’s some mathematical grounding to that but I think one of the things for me and my maths is okay but good enough that I need to do my job. My mental arithmetic is non-existent. I see an obvious clear and distinct overlap between art and maths. Maths is fundamentally a creative endeavor the moment you get into the more brutal edges of it and I did an episode which started off talking about Fermat’s Last Spherum earlier this year yeah and for me the really important mathematicians all say the same thing is that the right proof for a mathematical problem is you know it’s right because it’s beautiful it’s elegant and I find you know and it sort of reflects the idea that yes of course nature is beautiful and mathematics is the language of nature really and so it should be beautiful too right? Yeah no I mean a lot of the time I think if you’ve got a mathematical bent you’re looking for the formula underneath the surface you know why does something look like it does it’s not because you can really appreciate the randomness and complexity on the surface because you can understand that there’s a model underneath and the model as a great mathematician George Bloch said every model is wrong but some are useful and so you know I think what we have with mathematical theorems is is something that are beautiful because it condense the complexity of the the world and the universe or an imaginative imaginative logical space into something that is is understandable and clear and simple it’s a wonderful thing it’s a wonderful thing all right I couldn’t agree more right so let’s bring this one back to the here and now so you’ve experienced a period of burnout I can empathize with that greatly I think you’re quite like me in that your brain is never quiet and so how how do you feel that your art practice is helping your recovery hopefully you’re recovering from burnout I think the art practice and again you know it’s not about results it’s about getting there and doing something I’ve got my own way of gauging what I think is interesting and what I’m curious about at a particular point in time but um the process of making something in whatever media is a kind of way of articulating a response and a reaction to something in life and even the most abstract of artists will still be responding to something it’s a reaction art is a reaction to something and the art practice is the creation of something that you know other people may call art you know they may call it good bad or ugly art it doesn’t really matter but it it’s something that exists outside of our our mental space it’s got a physical reality even if it’s a performative piece that you still end up with a level of documentation so it’s this kind of like this transition of of taking stuff that you may be may have in your head or you know there may be threads in your head that you’re putting into a manifestation in some form of media and I think that whole process is is very empowering um completely mesmerizing and uh you know full of surprises and I think that’s the kind of thing that is very life affirming it gives us a sense of control it may be a very limited sphere of control but it gives us a sense of control a sense of identity a sense of purpose and a sense of curiosity you know what happens if I do this next what happens if I did you know green instead of red or you know whatever and it can be very very simple or it can be you know highly complex where you’re dealing with what happens with you know a particular idea if I place that idea in in combination with another idea what happens so I think all that is just really really important and it means that you know your mind and your body and your soul are engaged in something other than that the mundaneness and the banality of of everyday life and you’re lifting it to a higher level so for me that is really important in terms of being in some way in control of your own destiny you know and art is not a process of is it is a process for me of discovery and curiosity it’s not about an end point necessarily but that that I think is very life affirming and I think it’s really important to find those aspects of creativity in our lives because it gives us meaning and it gives us purpose and for me that’s that’s been a significant part of my recovery and even if I’m looking at things like you know magpies connecting stuff for their nests you know they’ll pick up the most crazy things to carry across from you know the the roof to the tree where they’re building their nest and it just shows that creativity is not just a human attribute it exists within the the plant and animal kingdom as well and it’s something that we all need to find a way of tapping into to to connect to the the universe and something that’s wider than ourselves yeah I couldn’t agree more I um I’ve recorded a bunch of videos for my youtube channel and some of them are me walking around my local woods just looking at stuff I doubt anyone wants to watch this crap but I’m like oh look at this oh there’s bird there’s like you know yeah look at this tree isn’t this tree awesome and uh and part of the reason I do it is because I can get into my own head when I’m wandering around I sometimes I’ll slap on a podcast or an audiobook sometimes I’ll listen to music and my brain wanders and and I’ve walked for a mile and I haven’t noticed anything and so what this does actually is forces me to to look and I know what I found actually um you know sort of a valuable use of having these horrible glowing rectangles we keep in our pockets is that actually if I feel like I you know want to share something you know it makes me more alert to what’s around me and and and I might pull out and take a picture but but I’ve noticed it you know I mean and and that’s really important to me because I can miss stuff my brain never shuts up and and but I get really excited and I find it really satisfying to sort of see and observe the world around me and and I think art is a really good way of of making me do that and I really love the comments around control because that resonates with me massively right now because I lost a lot of control over my life um you know over the last year and and it really does feel like the art is one thing I do have control over and that’s why I think part of the reason I find it so calming and therapeutic and and that’s a it’s a really interesting aspect of it that I’m definitely going to drill more down on in the coming weeks the aspect of just being curious about our every day is something that I was very you know it’s still something I was part of my practice so the every day is part of my practice and sometimes I would just go down the street and with my little screen my mobile camera and and it will just be I’ll walk I need to walk a hundred steps or 150 steps and then I need to look to the left and I’ll take an image of what I find interesting so instead of blanking it out I’ll actually try and consciously within the space of time where you’re not able to consciously think about why you like it or why you don’t and is it art or is it not art it’s just something that you find of interest and so you can kind of like do that walk looking at the sky looking at the ground looking at uh left to right or whatever and and you end up with this kind of like collage and condensation of um your walk and your walk is a kind of like it’s um a completely metaphysical activity which is completely unique to you you’re in your own body but you’re also in your own mind so you can be thinking about I know anything in anything in the world or anything out of this world at the same time as being placed in this physical location which is completely specific you know to this moving planet and you know most of the time we’re not really conscious of of what’s going on we blank it out art and observation can be very interesting ways of trying to reconnect to just what it’s like being alive on this planet today so so here you have it folks the metaphysics of walking to the shop to buy a pint of milk right yeah yeah yeah yeah i i mean it’s very zen and i love it um and i can again talk about this all day i’m gonna start drawing this to a close though um and i really really don’t want to so we’ll do this again so uh just coming up to this time of the year one of the the regular fixtures of my christmas is christmas cards from you i always feel incredibly guilty i stopped doing christmas cards of any sort decades ago um and i have nowhere nothing like the discipline to be able to start you know making works of art to send to you know friends and family at christmas but this is exactly what you do and your christmas cards for want of a better word are many works of well they’re just works of art they’re they’re fabulous they’re uh one thing that perhaps isn’t clear about mark’s work if you only see it digitally is that when you get a physical piece it’s it’s beautiful high quality products high quality materials highly precisely assembled and completely unique so i’m not talking about you know santa and his reindeers uh you know depicted on the front of a bit of we we can show you we could do a little we could do a little this is uh my 2024 christmas art drop and so it’s a combo of mona lisa with a little bit of abstraction in a way in red and green that’s really cool and you get a lot of uh you can see this mona lisa in the background so it’s got a bit of dimension then you get a layer of this on the top which shows the golden section so you can see that there’s not just that then you get a bit of text on the back that you won’t be able to read but this says leonardo da vinci used the mathematical fibonacci pattern to create the mona lisa so when you’re looking at the mona lisa it’s not just a painting of a person it’s actually a mathematical construct as well uh you’ve got visari saying in this work of leonardo there was a smile so pleasing that it was a thing more divine than human to behold it was not other than alive and then when you think about what we’re doing at the moment you’ve got mathematical patterns non-organic forms of intelligence and used surveillance are attributes of ai so artificial intelligence so therefore is it logical to consider mona lisa to be an early ancestor and precursor of artificial intelligence so you get that oh my god right and then you’ve got this piece of work is kind of like an assemblage and it’s got a little black sheet of paper with my little stamp on so you can see how the the fibonacci relates to mona lisa and then within the within the little package which all fits into an a5 envelope so it’s all cheap and cheerful you get a certificate of authentication as well plus a little oh my god plus a little bit of uh christmas message hand written by me and that’s the only that’s the only part that i’m really doing so you get my signature and any any little i mean there’s a bit of war hole there i think um and uh always a pleasure i mean ultimately you have to make friends with mark so that he’ll send you one of his christmas cards which i’m sure are going to be worth lots of money uh in the future so i went to see the the mona lisa at the louvre i’m sure you’ve done it yourself and what struck me about it is i had to queue up and then you sort of get to see it and there’s a bunch of like tourists in front of it with cameras and camera phones and stuff so most of your view of the mona lisa is obscured by little electronic rectangles of people taking photos of it of themselves obscuring the mona lisa so it can’t be properly seen in their photo and and it just struck me as being so very modern and bizarre that and and i really hate queues and i really hate crowds so it was such uh a confusing and a pilgrimage to something that was highly contemporary and not just the mona lisa well i think it was an artwork in itself right i think that the scene was an artwork and and i don’t think anyone realized that they were part of this big piece of performance art and it’s so recursive especially when you get into the realms of you know uh dan brown and stuff like that and as much as all of that’s made up nonsense says there is some facts and truth in that and and the mona lisa as a piece of culture has accumulated so much extra so many extra layers and that’s really interesting about your own work where it’s got you know your christmas card where it’s got the layers on top you’ve got a digital layer and a physical layer and then the the whole golden ratio and things like that i just think the mona lisa as a painting itself i have no interest in i have a lot of interest in the culture that that surrounds it right up to this very day it’s absolutely fascinating i guess we’re drawing to a close and i think we could uh we could carry on talking for a lot longer alex and it’s really really well it’s always a delightful to you and uh to to catch up so thank you for inviting me and um it’s quite right um can you tell us where to find you on the interwebs uh i’ve got a website which is uh www mark b dot space so that’s my website and if you’re looking for my instagram it’s mark burden that’s m-a-r-k b-u-r-d-e-n underscore art so uh you know feel free to follow me and feel free to drop into my website what i’m planning to do in 2025 is to do some virtual exhibitions uh on my website so it has been lacking a little bit of tlc for the last couple of years because i’ve just been too busy to do too much else but uh you’ll see some uh some changes and you’ll see that i’ll be making it much easier for people to buy work from me rather than making it quite difficult at times i’ll just become friends of you and that you’ll send you you’ll send people your artwork for christmas um for free um you should start charging i’m gonna auction it off and uh yeah you can see you can see how much it uh it goes for but it’s um the the work that i produce i think has got a very high value it may not have a high price at the moment but it will do over time i’m sure it will um so i’m going to hold on to it for the moment uh as an investment in the future okay um well this has been so so interesting as ever every time we talk mark um it’s always absolutely fascinating you say so many incredible things um so thanks for your time enjoy your christmas and uh we will definitely talk again well i mean i’m just fascinated by your practice alex i’m fascinated by what you’re doing with uh art and mental health i think it’s so vitally important so i really appreciate what you’re doing i really love the work you’re doing i think it just continues to develop and evolve and um yeah i’m looking forward to uh you know collaborating and meeting up in the new year in some shape or form and uh thank you very very much for inviting me today brilliant absolutely thank you very much and we’ll speak soon bye bye