New Website, New Media, Collaboration
I'm an artist who has spent the last five years working on very specific artworks – mostly under the umbrella of painting. As of mid 2014, I embarked upon a new series of projects that see my camera as a medium equal to my paintbrushes. These projects are wide ranging in their exploration, but unified by theme. I'm looking for evidence, for traces of past lives – the lives of places, the lives of people.
My painting practice is heavily concerned with the past, as well as the changing fate of our planet. I work exclusively with found objects, creating artworks with, and upon, items and objects of considerable age. I create paintings which bear witness to their previous lives, picking surfaces that speak of function, of use. In these paintings, the subject matter has always been to do with sustainability (recycling) and the passing of time – most evidently in my paintings of sea.
These new-media works inform and support my painted works, whilst also documenting research. None of this work could have been made possible without the guidance and support of artist Gonzaga Gómez-Cortázar Romero, whose work I urge you to explore.
Gonzaga and I met at an environmentally focussed arts residency in the Almería arid-zone. His photographic works, particularly those created in the surrounding Los Vélez park possess a potent undercurrent, an energy that subtly emanates from each photograph. On initial viewing – the images which make up his series Espesuras for example – seem to be concerned mostly with a fleeting light, captured at a specific time of day. But for me – in the works we have made together – it is the darkness that speaks the most.
His photographs describe an imagined world, one stuck in permanent twilight, one where neither day nor night exist. Waves of claustrophobia distract from focusing solely on the beauty of these photographs, not just because they offer no sky, but because they’re deceptive: they overwrite the landscape with a light which has little to do with their subject. They’re surreal, dream-like, and for me – very powerful. In all of our collaborative endeavours, this aesthetic has been vital in conveying themes related to climate change and landscape abandonment.
Above image: forest fire aftermath research, created whilst filming El Bosque Encarnado.
Above: Espesura VI, one from Gonzaga's Espesuras series.