Kevin Parker was born in London and attended Goldsmiths’ College of Art, receiving a 1st Class BA (Hons) in Fine Art in 1989 and an MA at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1996. His body of work ranges from experimental film with Body-Eyes from 1989 to austere yet intimate charcoal drawings such as Dark Wood in 2018. Since 1989 Kevin’s films, photographs and drawings have been exhibited both nationally and internationally.

In 2015, Kevin completed his PhD in Art History at The Open University by researching notions of translation in relation to the film and video work of a selection of Black artists working in Britain. Kevin is an Associate Lecturer for The Open University and teaches on Module A111 Discovering the arts and humanities and A236 Art and visual cultures in the modern world.

Kevin resumed his art practice in 2016 and has exhibited his work including a solo show Darkness Visible. He is co-curator of the online exhibition Carbon-Borders-Voices. In addition, he is drafting a monologue ‘Translation: Contemporary artists’ film and video in Britain’ following his doctoral thesis in this field. 

 

Kevin's monochromatic works foster a greater attentiveness to subtle detail and draw attention to the existence of a palimpsest of ‘narratives’ within a single frame. Across the drawings, elements appear and reappear, echoing and resembling one another; threads in an elusive network of appearances deferred.

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Kevin brings into play the Old Norse term ‘Myrkviðr’, or ‘Dark Wood’. According to the Nordic and Germanic scholar Francis Gentry, crossing the ‘Dark Forest’ in Norse tradition signified ‘penetrating the barriers between one world and another'. His artwork is concerned with traversing borders. The ‘location’ of these borders is sited between the artistic, the political, the emotional and the geographic, and less, as the poet Seamus Heaney put it in his introduction to Beowulf, in a 'clear map-sense of the world.' Borders for Kevin operate between digging, burning, finding and exposing on the one hand, and relating, connecting and interacting on the other.

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