May Your Heart be the Map Painting

Geoff Diego Litherland draws us into a future of both hope and anxiety. Weaving together these disparate cultural references into portraits, maps and landscapes, he creates an overarching narrative, an invitation to journey into the unknown as explorers of what might be. In these works of fluid beauty and technical bravado Litherland constructs the future from the past, fiction from fact. He sends us out into the stars as settlers of new worlds, where in the face of impending environmental disaster we can start again. Although human figures are largely absent from Litherland's paintings, a series of portraits offer the viewer a glimpse of the 'future explorers' that might have once inhabited these landscapes and traveled aboard these spaceships. Whilst the inspiration for these figures comes from some of the great scientists and artists of the past, these identities are now lost. Deprived of any identifying features and dressed in the same archaic spacesuits, these timeless individuals are now members of a new world order where existing distinctions are broken down. Scientist and Artist, Rationalist and Believer fuse into a single new category - Explorer. Reminiscent of the naive portraits painted by early colonial settlers these paintings confront the viewer with a piercing gaze, challenging us to follow where they have already gone. Dr Richard Davey