I spent 6 weeks at the Banff Centre, with visits to the Athabasca Oil Sands and other sites of our  industrial economy.  I was deeply moved by the conjunction of the mountains – with all the meanings that we ascribe to them – and our ambitions for fossil fuels.  I have been interrogating these images in the studio, in their sublimity and complexity, to make images of aspiration and entanglement.

 

I have developed a visual language of intricately painted images that are spliced and flayed, hanging off the walls and ceiling.  This energy of life, and violent re-ordering, reflects both the vitality and risk of our changing global culture.  It provokes the awareness that we need to re-imagine and re-order how we live.

 

This turn in my work has been enriched by exploring art movements, following the Second World War, where artists attacked their own paintings.  The Gutai movement of Japan, and Buri and Fontana in Italy, are pertinent examples.  The experience of societal upheaval seems to have provoked this iconoclastic search for a new mode of expression.

 

The images of mountains and oil-sands machinery return hauntingly through my thoughts and painting process.  I transform them through geometry, colour, and accumulation.  It has become very clear that the aspirational setting of the mountains is intricately linked to our obsessions for speed, efficiency, and fossil fuels.  I am exploring immersive structures that express a thrill of colour and movement, and that also implicate the viewer in this environmental dynamic.