Infrastructure Light

Paintings, from A3 to postcard sized of ‘real landscapes’, largely in East Asian cities and focused on how the landscape of contemporary people is largely of obscure angles and reflections and infrastructural shapes and lines. I am interested in the actuality of the urban landscape which is often not a street scene, but moments of often an un-digested mix of industrial and transport structures glimpsed through reflected internal and external lighting. As my day job involves being a researcher of and in East Asia I have made these paintings partly as a material study of this working environment. The paintings here follow from New Year 2024 when the huge frozen plot of empty land in Seoul city centre following the evacuation of the postwar US military base at Dragon City left a revealing visible hole of the forces of the city. These images are not intended to be Oriental fetish pieces, but are more about exploring the evolving and in transit environments in which masses of people actually live. While, painting I am searching for a sensibility: something that is neither utopian not dystopian, but somehow alert and beyond. (While it is not easily possible I try hard to find means to capture angles that are not the high-perspective upwards-focus of the shiny architecture images in advertising).