BIOGRAPHY Marcus Lyon (b. 1965) is a British artist. His works and publications are held in both private and international collections including the Smithsonian Institution, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Arts Council of Great Britain. He has been commissioned and exhibited globally. Born and raised in rural Britain, Lyon studied Political Science at Leeds University, Leadership at Harvard Business School and Performance Measurement at the Kennedy School of Government. His early working life with Amnesty International in Latin America was the inspiration for his twenty-five year exploration of the issues at the heart of globalisation. In the early 90’s he founded the Glassworks, an award-winning multidisciplinary art studio that acts as a gallery, exhibition venue and centre of excellence for commissioned and original art. As a portrait artist he has photographed a diverse range of public figures from Queen Elizabeth II, to Bill Nighy and the last four British Prime Ministers. His images have won numerous awards and nominations including the B&H Gold Award, Agfa Photographer of the Year, Prix Pictet 2012 & 2013, a D&AD Silver and five AOP’s. He has created extensive bodies of work around the subjects of disability sport and development, with particular focus on the urban space. The early 21st century saw his work move from the micro to the macro with the formation of the large scale BRIC, EXODUS and TIMEOUT series: explorations of our global mass behaviours. In recent years he has undertaken significant collaborative commissions producing large-scale imagery in the science/art arena, most notably his Optogenome series with Kings College and AstraZeneca. His most recent body of work, Somos Brasil (2017), that explores Brazilian identity through a series of sound and DNA enabled portraits, was recently featured as a TED talk. Outside of the art world Lyon is a determined social entrepreneur and an active public speaker. In the not for profit sector he serves on the board of the Somerset House Trust and Leaders’ Quest and is a Founder Ambassador for both BLESMA, Home-Start UK and the global think-tank The Consortium for Street Children. Currently he lives between central London and Brazil with his wife, Bel and their daughter Florence (2010) and their son Arthur (2012). ARTIST’S STATEMENT My early work took me to the slums and ghettos of the developing world to explore issues surrounding street children and child labour. I was then, and remain now, inspired by the resilience and adaptive skills of humanity at the edge. The ability en masse to negotiate the chaos of changing environments left a deep and lasting mark on my visual mind. And thus for the last twenty-five years my practice has centred on a search for meaning about our global mass behaviours. Emotionally and environmentally these mass ideas, actions, movements of people, production processes, and the titans of political and consumer power that house them, are so huge that no single image can define their influence. So I have endeavoured to create new visual languages within which I can communicate a deeper truth. The results depict landscapes without horizons, built from a myriad of perspectives, each one familiar to the inhabitants of these environments and yet intriguingly new: mirroring the multiple patterns of creation and migration that feed these homage’s to the human will to conquer and adapt in the name of the future. IN THE PRESS GUARDIAN – MY BEST SHOT BY KARIN ANDREASSON (19/02/2016) I was in Dubai in 2010, doing a speech for a charity, when I discovered the amazing Sheikh Zayed Road. It has 12 lanes, tall buildings and skyscrapers on either side, and stretches right through the middle of the city. I booked a hotel next to it so that I could get up on to the roof. I was probably up there for about an hour and a half, hanging over, shooting straight down. You get a bit dizzy doing that. The photograph started out as a little sketch in a book, though, just some lines, dots and ideas. Initially, I wanted to do something more music-based, but it morphed into a representation of my petrol-using life. It’s a composite of about 1,000 photos, and it took three months to make. I have a whole team of people who work with me to create an image like this, although I’m in charge of the idea. There are 750 vehicles in the end result, and they represent the 750,000 miles that I and the average car-owner will drive in a lifetime. Part of the thinking behind the work is that people are too visually literate and the world too fabulously complicated for me to say what I want in a single shot. So I bring multiple images together to create a greater truth. I think an image taken at 125th of a second is kind of a lie: it’s a moment captured in time, but then it disappears. With multiple images, I can go deeper, be subversive. So when people see this mega road I’ve created, they instantly ask questions. Is that really the world we live in? Is this image real or not? Where do I fit in to all of this? Although I cut my teeth on large-format photography, I now use digital cameras and computer manipulation. But I think it’s essential to make sure the perspective is still correct and the image works from one point of view. So, at the top of this picture, I made sure that you see slightly more of the sides of the buses than you do at the bottom, where you would be looking straight down on them. In the modern world, photography is instantly disposable. What I think is fascinating about images made this way is that they are really gluey. You get mesmerised by them. Your eyes are drawn to the whole composition, yet they can’t quite settle anywhere. As a final touch on all my creations, I insert a little Marcus. In this one, I’m in the top left-hand corner riding a bicycle.