Ben McCook Weir engages with oil painting as a means of interrogating the interplay between memory, perception, and representation. His practice is rooted in still life and figurative painting, utilizing objects and figures as mediators between personal recollection and material depiction. Working within the domestic sphere, he carves out both physical and temporal space, a process he refers to as etcetera, emphasizing the contingent nature of artistic production within the rhythms of daily life.
McCook-Weir’s work explores the instability of memory, where objects and images are subject to distortion, omission, and reconstruction. His paintings frequently draw from the mediated gaze of the phone camera or the subjective reconstruction of past experiences, flattening moments into compositions that hover between the personal and the archetypal. His engagement with queer experience informs this process, positioning his subjects within frameworks of community, identity, and temporality that diverge from dominant narratives of selfhood and history.
By foregrounding the materiality of oil paint and its capacity to both fix and obscure visual information, Weir examines the ways in which memory operates as a site of negotiation between presence and loss, certainty and ambiguity. His practice thus functions as both an act of remembrance and an inquiry into the mechanisms by which the fleeting is rendered tangible.
Ben McCook-Weir graduated with a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) in 2022 from Otago University.