Landscape

Opening Date: 2002-Feb-22
Closing Date: 2002-May-17
In 2002 the Saatchi Gallery published a book entitled 'Landscape', ISBN 0-9538587-6-6, profiling 25 artists work from his collection including my own. The painting 'Exhale' drew on my research from around industrial sites on the outskirts of London. This large-scale oil painting depicting a series of gasometers behind a wasteland in Bow. I find these industrial sites have a haunting architectural beauty of their own and I do not attempt to present them in a critical or negative light. Rather I want to show an unidealized acceptance of our ever-changing 'countryside'.

The painting 'The Hangar' was the result of research in Norwich and Suffolk, which explored the presence and impact of the American and British military on the immediate environment. The large-scale landscape is dominated by a field of corn with a hangar depicted on the horizon. After visiting the airbases of Lakenheath, Mildenhall and Bentwaters and the army training ground at Stamford I became interested in the strange counterpoint military machinery created against the backdrop of the British countryside. Although war has increasingly become experienced through the media for a majority of British, the machinery seemed a haunting reminder of the continuing conflicts overseas. Much recent scholarship among 'Revolution in Military Affairs' commentators has suggested that war, as we know it is at an end. The Gulf War was a very different type of combat from the First World War, for instance - Clausewitz's 'Absolute war', with its clearly defined strategy and purpose, versus Baudrillard's 'Clean warfare', with its altogether more abstract notion of simulacra.

In my paintings I aimed to explore the gap between our emotional and intellectual response to war in this country and the actuality. Questioning how the pioneering technology, sophisticated strategies and subtle media coverage have actually changed the nature of warfare.