What informs my art practice? Perhaps it’s living in an urban culture where a century of city building destroyed much of the previous landscape, where the built form is obviously ephemeral. Perhaps it’s having moved away and returned, and realising that every place is many places at different times and only one of them is now. Perhaps it’s about wanting to reinforce some strands to the thread of local stories which can so easily fray and break. While I celebrate the inner city’s energy, difference, anonymity and opportunity to make my own path - I also feel an obligation to understand in the deepest way, the places I inhabit.
Learning about urban planning, natural systems and history, and many years of road trips with a father obsessed by geology taught me to enjoy contemplating the unseen aspects of place that cohabit in ones imagination with the contemporaneously visible. The world underground, the now destroyed built fabric, the previous inhabitants, the imagined reconstructed journey, the flows of energy. I am interested in the inner landscape of the imagination and how painting can evoke this, using the intimate connection from the mind to the painted gesture and how to make the unseen elements explicit.
So my practice involves contemplating the places that I move around (most often on foot, most often routinely, but occasionally on a short visit which I later recall). I observe a place, photograph it, and research it in books, maps and other visual material. And having re-imagined a place in this way I embark on an artwork which I hope will evoke some aspect of the place that is more than its contemporary appearance.
There is a challenge in considering how best to construct the view in a painting of such an inner landscape. New technology has enabled everyone to see, representations of space different to the universally accessible ground level photograph. Google Earth or virtual worlds or ironically, old technology such as maps now that they are online. The ‘new’ views feed into the imagination and contribute to the inner landscape. I have used different views relating to the way I see the place in my mind. Often this is a hybrid of a photographic view, a map and something more amorphous.
I enjoy the physicality of working with paint – of letting it surprise and be unpredictable, of considering what marks and colours to use to evoke forms or sensations and then using it to conceal and edit.
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