artist's statement
My work focuses on the junctures of nature/culture, city/country as well as my own position with regard to them. Currently I am exploring these notions under the umbrella of the genre of ‘landscape’ which itself already implies a juxtaposition of the natural and the cultural.
Travelling has always been a passion of mine and I use my movement through the world as the basis of my art practice. This interest has led me to explore the use of paths and roads in the landscape and where they can lead me both physically and psychologically. On the Road is an ongoing series of work in painting, video and photography that was initially a response to the repetitiveness of motorway travel and how the passing landscape is viewed from transport and references road movies and panoramic photography. Like Friedrich’s lone figure experiencing the sublime the lone driver in road movies has entered our consciousness as a landscape convention.
This series of work is also about boundaries, how we are kept to the route. Do crash barriers make us feel safe or more at danger? I depict the area between where I have come from and where I am going – the boring part of the journey that has to be ‘got through’. These works are intended to reflect space, tedium and the passing of time while commenting on spaces ‘in between’ (or non-spaces) that allow me to reflect on the changing landscape, where I am in relation to this and where the boundaries lie between city/country, nature/culture.
My approach to painting can have two starting points, the first conceptual and the other process–based. As a result in some cases I am creating paintings of landscapes but in others landscapes of painting. In the first method I already have an idea of the concerns I wish to explore and in second, I lay down many layers of paint washes onto the support to discover if the resulting effect brings to mind a landscape from memory. This is a chance method rather like the ‘frottages’ of Max Ernst. By these two methods of working I am exploring whether ‘landscape’ can be used successfully as a metaphor for cultural change and memory.
Recently I have been depicting trees in my work as I see them as an archetypal symbol of landscape painting and a metaphor for other issues such as ‘silent witnesses’ to events, as memorials, used in political and environmental issues and as a metaphor for the self or national identity.
I am interested in mans intervention into the landscape as a signifier of cultural change.
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