My practice aims to challenge and confront the sense of nostalgia inherent in traditional landscape painting that portrays unrealistic and romantic views of the land to highlight the harm to our natural environment as a result of human avarice, industry and neglect. It is easy to overlook the damage that is being done to our environment and cling on to the image of an unpolluted landscape. My work explores an attraction to the beauty of nature and relies on this to expose the reality of the harm the environment is subjected to. Contrasting fragments of our natural landscape and imagery of environmental harm are brought together in a dialectical way to provoke a reaction. This emphasises the reality of our natural environment, not some bucolic idyll, and underlines the actuality that the elements of unspoiled natural landscape may one day be lost and only a distant memory if the causes of its depletion are not acknowledged and acted upon.
My current practice explores these ideas through painting, drawing and collage. I use collage to create initial works in their own right and also to create amalgamations of imagery which then become translated and reimagined through painting. Working in this way, I seek to break the conventions of a typical landscape painting challenging assumptions of format, spatial content and perspective. The multiple perspectives and scales of my final images develop into a new and believable image where natural landscape beauty is not separate from environmental issues but used to highlight them.
