Biography
In an image-laden world we experience visions and visual metaphors differently every time we see something, even when it appears to be the same thing again, as we project our own perceptions onto the object of experience and that object shifts between contexts. My paintings explore architecture and the built environment, less in terms of how they are engineered or put to use and more in terms of how we constantly re-make images of the built world every time we look at spaces differently. Based on fragments of photographs that recompose actual scenarios when mixed together, my paintings exaggerate these newly combined spaces and explore what might happen in them. These are spaces that could never actually exist -- they are hybrid spaces based on a collage of impressions. That slight remove from the actual world allows me to experiment with the material specificities of paint just as much as to experiment with formal issues of composition. The plasticity and vibrancy of the colourful geometric shapes that I overlay on the supposedly two-dimensional surface of the canvas are heavily influenced by the virtual worlds of networked computers. I sometimes project three-dimensional animations onto the canvas, penetrating the picture plane, animating the stillness of its picture. In those works, the medium-specific qualities of the painting take a backseat as the projected animations and the painted surface feed off each other, playfully questioning our preconceived notions of what is real and what is not.
Furthermore, my paintings may be seen as landscapes -- the interior landscapes of limitless virtual space or the exterior landscapes of networked cities. With the digital world embedded in our daily physical experience of cities, being an artist in a city means constantly relating to technology. My paintings explore how the physical world, and objects like paintings made to represent it, can exist as surrogate phenomena for the digitally immaterial. This process of physicalising the digital seems back-to-front to me, but for that same reason I find it thought provoking. The collaging I do responds to the 'cut and paste' gestures common to our digital age. The process of adding and subtracting layers of colour translates just such practices of re-using as if they were practices of re-seeing, in the sense of seeing again the multiple, simultaneous and hectic visions of layered spaces we have everyday in a city.
