David Hancock brings Cosplay to Touchstones

In the country of hearts by David Hancock

David Hancock creates paintings which explore the youth subculture of cosplay.

Cosplayers dress up and role-play characters from Manga, Anime or computer games, creating a live-action version of them in the public arena.

Cosplayers bring to life these fictional beings, expanding their world into ours as they spend several months constructing a detailed outfit and exploring their character's persona. They take on their identity, which is further developed through their interactions with other cosplayers socially.

As with computer games, cosplay is a form of immersive escapism. Cosplayers appropriate urban locations seeing public spaces as a stage and themselves as actors performing as their chosen characters. Although the public may interact in the same space, the cosplayer is simultaneously on another plane; an internal fantasy constructed within their mind and imposed upon the real landscape. An object or location within the real world shifts to become something of significance in the fantasy. As with a constructed digital universe, the imagination of the individual has the ability to transform the mundane into the sublime.

Hancock captures cosplayers from around the UK, particularly the North West, in often large-scale, hyperreal watercolour paintings. His work is reliant on the involvement of the cosplayers as it develops from photographs he takes of them in various outdoor settings.

For this exhibition Hancock has made several new paintings featuring places in Rochdale as the backdrop for the cosplayers, transforming the town into a location from another world entirely.

In Hancock's portraits reality is mixed with fantasy. As the viewer, we can see the cosplayer inhabiting the real world, but at the same time their re-imagining of the actual landscape is going on in their subconscious and we are not party to their interpretation.

Hancock was born in Failsworth and studied art at Hopwood Hall College in Rochdale for four years after leaving school. He sees this time in Rochdale as a definitive period; he became interested in the subcultures which feature in his work and remembers visiting influential exhibitions here at Rochdale Art Gallery. He therefore sees this show as something of a homecoming.

Hancock has exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally including the John Moores 21 Contemporary painting exhibition and the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery. He is currently studying for a PhD at the University of Salford. Hancock co-founded PAPER, a gallery based in Manchester's Green Quarter in 2012.

The exhibition runs from Saturday 6 July to Saturday 7 September 2013.