Peter Harris and Mark Stewart are both essential elements that make up the bloodstream of music history, though they exist in different limbs of the same body.
Peter Harris is an artist and filmmaker, whose visual work has documented the icons and moments of music history through a twisted lens. Mark Stewart is one of the pioneers of the post-punk genre — as a founding member of The Pop Group — and a musician whose influence can still be heard today.
The two have collaborated on a new audiovisual project, hosted on a new website, ‘BombArt’, which features ‘Hybrid portraits’: a combination of the sitter, and the sitter’s influences.
The two have also reached out to music legends Bootsy Collins and Lee “Scratch” Perry for guest portraits — Harris and Perry previously collaborated on a series of paintings, The Higher Powers Bible, which saw Perry starring in alternative Bible stories.
I spoke with Peter Harris and Mark Stewart ahead of the website’s release to discuss the BombArt project.
How are things with you lately?
Peter Harris: I’m back and firing on all cylinders after a rough couple of corona filled months!
Tell me a bit about the origins of the BombArt project?
Mark Stewart: Me and Peter started collaborating on some “imploded cinema” and the counterintuitive sparks were shocking. BombArt is an embassy for the imagination.
Can you explain a bit about the artists involved in the project and
what they bring to it?
Mark: The hybrid portraits are morphs of fellow outsiders, like Lautréamont, Foucault and Huysmans, into me. It’s a form of psychic arcao-logy. This remote viewing of the exhibition ‘autopsy of a myth’ challenges the conventions of paraesthetics seeking through time to stage these encounters. Perhaps it’s a vertiginous mirror or a source of information medicine.
Where do you see this project going in the near future?
Mark: Mars.
Peter: On. (Life)
Is it important for people to know their influences/influencers?
Mark: ahh the enigma of Kaspar Hauser but hail all sparklords.
Peter: I think it is, as in some ways that’s all we are — a bunch of combined influences that make up our personalities.
Tell me one random, influential person — not necessarily most
influential — who you have to give thanks to. What did they give to you or communicate with you by their way of living or their work?
Mark: Kenneth Anger, he really influenced us early punk rockers. I got to collaborate with him a couple of times so far and it’s magical.
Peter: My Sister, she died young and that influenced me to use up every day like it’s my last.
See the ongoing project at the BombArt website.
