Biography and Artist's Statement
1987 Born, London
Lives and works in London and Hampshire
Studies
2006 - 2009 City and Guilds of London Art School BA Fine Art Painting
2005 - 2006 Byam Shaw School of Art Foundation
Exhibitions
2010 February Young Talents, Affordable Art Fair - Brussels
2009 October The Recent Graduates 2009, Affordable Art Fair - London
2009 August Hampshire Open Studios - Lymington
2009 June City and Guilds of London Art School Degree Show - London
2008 June Trinity Buoy Wharf - London
2008 May The Jago - London
2007 June Art Space Interim Show - London
2006 September Babington House - London
2006 May Eltham College - London
2006 March Stark Gallery - Canterbury
As a child I spent considerable time in the New Forest, so rather than finding forests threatening, I think of them as offering sanctuary and calm. I believe they could be the only natural wilderness everyone can relate to, whether it is from a direct encounter or childhood memories of the park.
Forests are emotionally loaded not only with myth and fairytale but also with our base instinct to fear the unknown, resulting in a longing for shelter or protection. The structures I integrate into the landscape are based on Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian houses. Initially they give the illusion of a building, which could be a refuge, however in reality they are no more than geometric planes, which create a facade. It is this longing to be protected in an unknown environment, or our wish to live at a retreat from the world, that lets us believe these structures are complete dwellings.
Taking Wright's Usonian houses and laying them in majestic and perhaps romantic forestscapes, where they do not naturally belong, gives them an isolated grandeur. In an environment that causes style and design to be redundant, they become heroic and absurd. Yet it is the specific design features of the Usonian house; the cantilevered flat roof, the large glass doors and the wooden cladding that contrast with the coniferous forest creating a sublime moment. I disassemble his structures in order to enrich elements and allow the environment and landscape to become the architecture in a harmony of physical impossibility.
My 'Still-life landscapes' are a development of planar forms that allow the landscape image to become an object in its own right. These pieces are the beginning of a new stage of integration and blurring in my work between landscape, architecture and perception.
