I am interested in our landscape, our everyday environments, how our world is represented to us through visual information and how this influences our comprehension of the world around us, including the process’s and materials that we form our landscape with and in turn how this forms our sense of identity.
I get my materials from large DIY stores, to me these have a soulless feel to them, cheap mass produced things are bought and sold in bulk, going on to form our everyday environment. I take them before they go on to that stage and transform them into something that questions it.
Old abandoned buildings, vehicles, sometimes vandalised or burnt out amidst woods and forests are some of the subject matter that occupies my disenchanted landscapes. They originate from images of man-made structures and trees found online. Visual information in the online environment forms a large amount of how we now come to experience things. I’m interested in how this visual information can be altered and manipulated to form alternate interpretations of our world.
To explore this I project multiple numbers of these images (for a single painting) onto MDF, these images become the foundation for my drawing process, partly an accurate representation and partly from imagination. Premixed shades of matt monochrome household paint contribute to the raw, abandoned, gritty aesthetic of my landscapes which stems from my cynicism of utopian notions surrounding our relationship with the natural world.
I cut them with an electric jigsaw and fretsaw blades between my fingers to produce the fine detailing in place of using a CNC laser or router machine for the outlines of the trees and braches. My current paintings have stemmed directly from earlier work which involved the same painstaking hand cutting of very detailed tree branches in MDF, often taking hundreds of hours but without the use of any paint. This element of my work was/is a response to the effect mechanical production is having on our landscape and the alienation to the natural world it produces when our everyday environments loose resemblance to nature and become based on themselves.
I get my materials from large DIY stores, to me these have a soulless feel to them, cheap mass produced things are bought and sold in bulk, going on to form our everyday environment. I take them before they go on to that stage and transform them into something that questions it.
Old abandoned buildings, vehicles, sometimes vandalised or burnt out amidst woods and forests are some of the subject matter that occupies my disenchanted landscapes. They originate from images of man-made structures and trees found online. Visual information in the online environment forms a large amount of how we now come to experience things. I’m interested in how this visual information can be altered and manipulated to form alternate interpretations of our world.
To explore this I project multiple numbers of these images (for a single painting) onto MDF, these images become the foundation for my drawing process, partly an accurate representation and partly from imagination. Premixed shades of matt monochrome household paint contribute to the raw, abandoned, gritty aesthetic of my landscapes which stems from my cynicism of utopian notions surrounding our relationship with the natural world.
I cut them with an electric jigsaw and fretsaw blades between my fingers to produce the fine detailing in place of using a CNC laser or router machine for the outlines of the trees and braches. My current paintings have stemmed directly from earlier work which involved the same painstaking hand cutting of very detailed tree branches in MDF, often taking hundreds of hours but without the use of any paint. This element of my work was/is a response to the effect mechanical production is having on our landscape and the alienation to the natural world it produces when our everyday environments loose resemblance to nature and become based on themselves.
