Iain Douglas
Born 1975, United Kingdom. Lives and works in the Netherlands.
Iain Douglas is an artist and lecturer working across sculpture, installation, film and machinima. His practice is concerned with forgotten histories and class, and with the older myths that lie beneath familiar stories.
His sculpture brings plaster and cloth together with the materials of domestic infrastructure (copper pipe, electrical cable, Bakelite fittings and gloss paint) and with natural matter such as thorns and feathers. Myth is approached through these ordinary materials: Sleeping Beauty traced back to its fourteenth-century source in Zellandine, Odin's ravens as a way into the loss of memory in the death of Thought and Memory, and the yoke as an image of working life in Yoke.
Douglas began his career as a game developer, building environments and assets for commercial titles, before turning to game engines as an artist. His machinima, films staged and shot inside the virtual worlds of video games, includes a long collaboration with the poet Mark Coverdale, among them facing the wolf (2021), Shanks’s 54 (2022) and Katoenopolis (2024), made for Rijksmuseum Twenthe.
Solo exhibitions
- 2022Shanks’s 54, B93, Enschede
- 2015the death of Thought and Memory, Devonport Live, Plymouth
- 2015Zellandine, Devonport Live, Plymouth
Selected group exhibitions
- 2021Revolt. Revive. Rekindle., NN Contemporary Art, Northampton (online). Work: Revolt, with Mark Coverdale and Oscar Crawford
- 2019Undercurrent, NN Contemporary Art, Northampton
- 2016Art on the Edge, Plymouth
- 2015National Open Art, Royal College of Art, London
- 2010Fresh from the Oven, Coachwerks, Brighton
Screenings and performances
- 2024Katoenopolis, film and live performance with Mark Coverdale, made for the reopening of the Sickhoes. RMTnext, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede
- 2023Milan Machinima Festival, Neo Avant-Garde programme (online). Work: Shanks’s 54, with Mark Coverdale
- 2022VRAL #50: Iain Douglas and Mark Coverdale, Milan Machinima Festival (online), curated by Matteo Bittanti. Work: facing the wolf
- 2021The Fields of Algorithms, The One Minutes, curated by David Blandy. Online premiere, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, with artists’ panel. Work: i didn’t get to kiss you goodbye