Back to Freedom

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By Gareth Bunting
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£750.00

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Dimensions (HxWxD):

70 × 50 × 0.1 cm

Materials:

indian ink on Fabriano paper

Primary Medium:

Drawing

Medium
2020
Signed on Back
Ready to display
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Back to Freedom is an artistic response to Gareth Bunting’s experience working in an Amazon warehouse — a place that, for him, epitomises the contradictions and psychological strain of late capitalism. Rendered in brush and ink on a monumental scale, the drawing employs a Western sense of linear perspective—unusual for Bunting, who often favours a more flattened, symbolic composition associated with Eastern traditions. The long corridor stretches towards a vanishing point, evoking claustrophobia and repetition; it becomes a psychological architecture, a metaphorical spider’s web spun by capitalism itself. For Bunting, the Amazon warehouse represents the perfect hyperreal symbol of wealth inequality: a vast labyrinth of consumer desire, owned by one of the richest men in the world. Inside, everything imaginable exists—except humanity. The artist’s hometown warehouse has had a corrosive effect on its community. Workers, overregulated and underpaid, are caught in a rhythm of exhaustion, their autonomy replaced by surveillance and algorithmic control. The warehouse becomes both a literal and mental maze, the belly of the beast—where the boundaries between human and machine blur. In the foreground sits a self-portrait of the artist, cross-legged, hidden behind a sketchbook, as though shielding himself from the gaze of the system. He becomes faceless—anonymous—reflecting his own experience of depersonalisation and psychological breakdown while working there. The piece reads like a visual diary of dissociation, a meditation on identity under pressure. On the shelves, religious sculptures replace the usual piles of kitsch consumer goods. This contrast forms an unsettling tension between the sacred and the profane: capitalism as the new religion of the 21st century. The warehouse, with more surveillance cameras than Heathrow Airport, becomes a panopticon—a temple to consumption and control. Bunting’s work is steeped in psychological introspection. Influenced by Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the hyperreal, he examines how the simulated replaces the real, how capitalism erodes authenticity, and how the psyche fractures under such conditions. His interest in psychology, psychiatry, and memory informs the symbolic layering of this work. Back to Freedom operates on multiple levels: as autobiography, social critique, and an exploration of mental health under the crushing logic of the contemporary world. In its final composition—part industrial cathedral, part mental labyrinth—the viewer is left questioning whether escape is possible, or whether freedom itself has become another illusion.

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