Gordon Culshaw is a UK based artist who studied agricultural economics and worked in West Africa before turning to fine art, studying in Liverpool and then in Manchester. He was a founding member of an art project space in Liverpool and continues to curate, though his focus is now on his own practice.

He looks at cultural artefacts, and, in searching for new ways in which they can be used, attempts to understand their position in a hierarchy of everyday objects and our relationship to them. Much of his work is informed by Flusser’s idea that ‘although technology is a tool which does what we want it to do, we can only want what technology can do’. With the breakdown of the subject/object dialectic, we now, wittingly or unwittingly, increasingly rely on technology and the objects it creates as a means to define ourselves.

His work has two interrelated strands: video and gadgets. In the videos, much of his recent work involves re-editing iconic movies in a way that attempts to examine how they might have shaped and created a particular sense of cultural identity. The gadgets he produces are often a playful appraisal of our wants and desires, looking at ways in which individuals choose to create their own personal identity by relating themselves to different combinations of cultural artefacts.