Craig Wood

Craig Wood is a visual artist, best known for his exploration of site-specificity and the impact of context on creativity. His artistic journey has been marked by a fascinating use of diverse media, from drawings and prints to contemporary installations.

Born in Edinburgh in 1960, Wood studied at Dyfed College of Art in Carmarthen from 1985 to 1986 before joining Goldsmiths College of Art in London to study Fine Art from 1986 to 1989. In addition to his work as a visual artist, he teaches Fine Art as Senior Lecturer at Swansea College of Art, UWTSD.

Wood was part of the Young British Artists, a loose group of artists, who graduated at the end of the 1980s and started to organise exhibitions in warehouses and factories. One of these notable shows was ‘Modern Medicine’, organised among others by Damien Hirst in 1990. For this show, Wood presented ‘Untitled’ (1990) in which he covered a large part of the exhibition space with water bags that were fitted around the architecture.

Wood has explored this site-specific approach, which was an incremental part of a number of his water pieces, throughout his career. Investigating the characteristics of 'site' and 'context' and how these factors influence creative processes and their resulting outcomes, have been guiding questions for his artistic practice. In this instance, the architecture served wood as a context to fit his water filled polythene bags all over the floor and to reshape the space.

In 1991, Wood installed another water piece at Chisenhale Gallery in East London, ‘Untitled’ (1991), where he placed waterfilled sheets on the gallery floor. The piece evoked notions of containment and human manipulation of natural elements while also resembling landscapes, suggesting either puddles or frozen expanses. Beneath this surface, the installation carried further a disconcerting undertone, hinting at the precarious state of a diminishing 'nature' preserved within controlled environments. It also served as a commentary on one of the more extravagant facets of the post-war economic boom: the proliferation of plastic packaging.

Smaller scale works include, for example, his print work ‘Safeway Gel Air Freshener, Alpine Garden’ (1992), which further hinted at notions of momentary sensations and spatiality of smell and atmospheric settings. In 1998, Wood created ‘Small Change (2p)’, a worm-like sculpture made from two pence coins that coiled up. His 1999 photographic series ‘Hair on Soap’ then brought the beholder face to face with someone else’s hairs on differently coloured soaps, which Wood photographed against a black background.

Throughout his career, Wood received numerous accolades like awards, fellowships, and residencies. In the 1990s he was awarded the Faber Castell Drawing Scholarship, Kunsthalle Nürnberg (1994), the P.A.C.A. Venice Residency with the University of Warwick (1994), and the DAAD Berlin Residency (1997). In 2003 won The Wakelin Award from the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea. The Arts Council of Wales awarded Wood the Major Creative Wales Award in 2012 and the National Eisteddfod presented him with The Tony Goble Award in 2013.

Wood has worked in a variety of media, producing works on paper, photographs, installations, sculptures, and more. Working within and creating frameworks for the beholder, Wood turns everyday items like plastic bags and bars of soap, as well as mugs, tiles, and small change into works of art that confront the beholder and request a change of perspective.