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Artist Statement

 

All of my work can be described as ‘Systems Art’ and most of these systems-based works relate, on some level to nature, landscape and a ‘sense of place’, (although some works deal more directly with the nature of Systems in ontological terms). Much of the work deals with the abstraction of ideas and phenomena, and can be understood in part through Abstract Painting, Systems Art, and Land Art, but also more broadly through the author’s original training in Environmental Science, and ideas of abstraction found in computer science and  data visualisation.

 

There has been an increased interest in engaging with nature, as an aesthetic practice, since the start of the millennium, and my work could be framed within this movement. A possible reason for this renewed interest in nature within art is our increasingly complex relationship to the physical world. Our conception of space, in abstract terms, is changing dramatically due to the spatial and temporal fluidity of the Internet. Therefore being ‘out there’ in the physical world is an attempt to ground experience and artistic practice in both the physical landscape and the psychological and sublime landscape.

 

My work though differs from much work classed as ‘Land Art’, in that the final works produced are mainly studio based and involves painting, film and installation. Here the work is interested in the space between two extreme positions within painting. Firstly there is the conceptual ‘Systems Artists’, such as Sol LeWitt who argued that the conceptual ‘idea becomes the machine that makes the art’. Whilst the second position is the intuitive painter who works instinctively and claims to be working from the subconscious. Examples include the abstract expressionists and their descendents, such as Cy Twombly. I am interested in finding a position between these extremes that makes sense for me as someone who uses in paint in the 21st Century. A position that acknowledges the technological, systemic and the algorithmic world we live in but at the same time being willing to transcend this to experience the sublime experience of being in the physical world.

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