"In the beginning" Painting

In the vein of an abstract art practice I am intuitively drawn to my source material, aerial maps and photographs. So too are the formal decisions I make shaped by unconscious compulsions and my own aesthetic sensibilities. The lines and marks that I produce and reproduce in my art are however directly drawn from this archive of visual material pertaining to different parts of the world. As I mix and combine elements from different geographical locations I end up (re)stitching maps and diverse places together, arriving at a sort of palimpsest that has is completely detached from any single place. In this way, while my art is formally driven, in the sense that I echo cartographical lines drawn from multiple sources that appeal to me, collectively and conceptually my approach results in works where the notion of space, place and the fixed markers that orientate navigation and identity are dismantled and deconstructed. As such I present abstract visual plains that are not geographically defined, though paradoxically, it relies on the language of cartography. I challenge the logic that governs it, where lines often signify connections between spaces and the histories that drive links between one place and another with regards to roads. Boundaries, roads, hills and other lines that define a landscape from an aerial view are combined in ways that are impossible to understand with relation to mapping. In certain works, I also work against a kind of painterly drive to compose balanced and pleasing images that make sense aesthetically. This is largely achieved through the seemingly chaotic and unusual compositions and colour combinations that define this body of work. This allows for a sense of dislocation and alienation to come to the fore. These qualities are associated with displacement, which occurs when you are lost, leave a familiar place, city or country or are unable to claim an identity tied to a geographical location. The lines and codes I disrupt are done subtly so as to remain familiar enough so as to evoke aerial mapping. This tension between the real and the abstract, the known and the strange and foreign articulates a pervasive sense of disorder that identity undergoes when we are dislocated, whether by geographical means or ideological means – where claiming citizenship to a single place has become impossible for sociopolitical or historical reasons. While I am interested in the conflict that imposed geographical borders and the limits on identity this can generate, I am also fixated with the notion of freedom, imagining this utopian place where national, geographical markers no longer over-determine subjectivity. Presently, our society is caught in between these two states; the drive to assert nationalism and more tightly define citizenship along geographical lines and the globalizing liberal movement asserting more fluid identities that are virtually forged. These are the themes my source material has led me to contemplate, given I am drawn to images used for navigation and mapping. As I push this visual language forward and explore its possibilities, I hope to unlock further ideas and tensions between geographical rootedness and displacement.