A Human Landscape

In “A Human Landscape”, I have brought my two separate working practices of painting and sculpture together to create a large-scale installation that portrays a personal historic perspective of the consequences of deracination and the politically displaced migrant.

This work is based on four photographs taken in Europe during WW2. The photographs provide a historical record of the journey of a group of women and children, almost the entire population of one village, taken from their homes and marched off into the hills never to return.

The original photographs were digitally altered to create four distorted abstract images painted onto canvases made from ‘shoddy’ felt. The “shoddy” felt used to form “A Human Landscape”, referenced the discarded lives of the women and children captured in the painted images. “Shoddy” is a material created from waste fabrics and recycled fibres sourced from around the world and processed in West Yorkshire local to where I live.

This series of four large-scale paintings are bound two together on two wooden frames to form a space in the gallery in which the viewer can take a journey alongside the women and children and become part of that landscape.