Joe Machine
| Joe Machine | |
|---|---|
Joe Machine
|
|
| Born |
Joseph Stokes 6 April 1973 Chatham, Kent, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | No formal training |
| Known for | Painting |
| Notable work | My Grandfather Will Fight You, Sea Shanty |
| Movement | Stuckism |
Joe Machine (born Joseph Stokes, 6 April 1973) is an English artist, poet and writer. He is a founding member of the Stuckists art group. His work has been called "raw and autobiographical".
Joseph Machine was born in Chatham, Kent, and comes from a Romany background on the Isle of Sheppey.
In 1988 Machine was sent to Alston House Approved School, Rochester, for the theft of scrap material, and the following year to Dover Borstal for young offenders, after burgling a greengrocers in Leysdown (Isle of Sheppey). He spent time claiming benefits and running the family business, an amusement arcade in Leysdown, as well as breeding Rottweiler dogs and working as a bouncer in South London night clubs.
He started painting around 1988 and has not had any formal college art training. He has described creativity as the way out of the background in which he felt trapped: "Painting and writing have been far better for me than any of the mistakes I made in stealing and fighting."
Since 1998 he has been having psychotherapy to deal with violence and sex problems.
In 1999 he was one of the 13 original founder members of the Stuckists, an anti-conceptual art group co-founded by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson. His painting Diana Dors With an Axe was used on the front cover of the first book on the group, The Stuckists, and also to promote the show The Real Turner Prize Show in Shoreditch in 2000.
Machine has exhibited widely with the Stuckists, most notably in their first national museum exhibition, at the Walker Art Gallery for the 2004 Liverpool Biennial. The exhibition, titled The Stuckists Punk Victorian, was a definitive showing of the Stuckist oeuvre, and Machine was one of the "featured artists". Reviewing the Walker show, Mark Lawson commented, referring to Machine's painting, Sea Shanty:
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