Pioneers Drawing

I am an artist living and working near Cambridge (UK). After years working as an architect, I’ve returned to making art — primarily drawings and paintings that shift between the abstract and the figurative. My recent figurative work appears to be copied from old photographs, but the scenes are entirely fictional. They’re based on images generated by AI, creating a strange loop: copies without originals, moments that never happened. I'm interested in how an image of an event can eclipse the event itself — or, in this case, replace it altogether. This series grew out of a recent holiday, where I had my first real encounter with influencers. I was struck by how often the experience of a beautiful place seemed secondary to getting the right photo. The image became the point; the moment itself, incidental. My earlier work, which I loosely call abstract, also plays with this idea. The images seem to depict something real, but they remain unplaceable — recognisable in form, but not in meaning. Like the figurative works, they explore representation as a kind of fantasy, and the strange power of images that refer to nothing but themselves.