James Paley-Yorke

The preoccupation with the artist and their natural surroundings has endured from the origins of civilization, itself. To interpret the twisted wilds into forms beyond that of scientific record exists before Ancient Egypt, Persia and the Asiatic continent in the guise of primitive cave paintings. As humanity's most basic creative gesture, nature and visual art has enjoyed a symbiotic relationship lasting more than 10 millennia. For the contemporary visual artist, two choices present themselves: to render nature strictly as it is revealed by the senses or to accelerate that vision to include the interaction of the present moment, filled with industry, technology and the inherent complications of modernity.
Hong Kong-based artist James Paley-Yorke elects a fleeting middle ground between the two, reinvigorating classical draftsmanship into a format pertinent to that of the contemporary visual vocabulary. His painstakingly executed details of bush life, taken from his native New Zealand roots, are ink drawings rendered in the spirit of the miniature; small, delicate, almost as precious as the shrinking patch of ecosystem, itself. On sheets of standardized white paper, Yorke opens a twisting, teeming window into the brushes and jungles...