DREW CAINES

    Drew is a ceramist and visual artist based in Leeds. Although working primarily with clay now, he has also been an illustrator, a graphic designer and digital media artist. Since establishing a studio with East Street Arts in 2016, Drew has exhibited his ceramics in galleries in Yorkshire, across the North of England and Milwaukee in the USA. He has work in private collections in France, USA, Mexico, Argentina, Canada, Norway, Australia and Belarus. You can see much more on his Instagram profiles @drewcainesceramics and @drewcainesgallery.

As an artist, Drew explores the relationships between humans, other animals (especially those we abuse and exploit) and the natural world we all share. In recent years he's become increasingly interested in the concept of the Anthropocene (the climatic era which is the result of human activity), an increasingly inevitable disaster we teeter on the brink of.

His art fuses a love of nature, folk-art traditions, ancient sources (such as Palaeolithic cave art), historical sacred and ethnographic art with more current influences such as Japanese character culture, advertising and pop surrealism. He hopes this blend of the ancient and modern creates contemporary artworks which have a timeless quality ...

Drew describes his art as “Archaic Pop” to reflect this mix.

Drew's robots are an example of this approach. They stand as cyphers for humanity and it’s much vaunted technological achievements ... given the chance they might conquer the planet but in reality they are smaller, weaker and more wonky than they would like you to think. The recipe for his robots is one teaspoon of Victorian industrial design and engineering, one teaspoon Japanese tin toys, one teaspoon African and Oceanic fetish idols and a pinch of nostalgia.