The subject matter is that of the everyday: vehicles, plastic water bottles, car engines, dogs, bears, and other animals that come from different areas of interest: technology, industry, and the natural world.

“He cleverly manipulates prevailing contemporary ideology to grand effect, making aesthetically pleasing art with socially critical impact.”[1] Packer’s process includes distinct and different, but all inter-related, media, beginning with an enormous collection of photographic images, both analog and digital.

Even though “illuminating ecological conditions is no mean accomplishment,”[1] Packer’s work has a strong element of warning, like other “future-conscious artists and creative thinkers”[3]—an awareness of the existence of the “post-industrial moment, a post-industrial vacuum, where not even the cleaners are working.”[8] The ceramic sculpture Bears that Dance is a direct example of warning, with two white polar bears linked together in some ill-defined and strange symbiotic human like relationship.

In 2006, a three-month residency at the Kohler Arts/Industry program[10] allowed the artist to realize a significant and ambitious project: full-size cast ceramic sculptures of V8 car engines.

In Packer’s own words: “I never thought how appropriate it would be to manufacture a quintessentially American industrial object in a factory setting.”[11] These sculptures were also included in the show The Moment at Hand[11] at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, as well as subsequently in galleries in New York, Chicago, and Seattle.

Packer was born in Amersham, England in 1960 and has lived in the United States since 1983, including Washington DC, Miami, Tallahassee and, since 1994, New York City.