‘Shifting Planes’ is a painting series that looks at empty landscapes in the hinterlands between the rural and the urban. It is part of a wider interest in the spatial culture of peripheral landscapes which I have explored through several bodies of work. 

 

This work looks at the ‘landscape’ and the ‘built environment’ as a transient and liminal space with a focus on unusual structures or topographies as well as places that have storied histories of abandonment, migration and rural depopulation. 

 

For me many of these landscapes represent a kind of ‘otherness’ that acts as a counter balance to normative notions of landscape painting, like the bucolic or the pastoral. 

 

I use different structures, social-histories or topographies as a starting point and amalgamate them into a kind of fictional landscape that acts as a metaphorical space to reflect upon wider socio-geographic issues, but these paintings are also intrinsically linked to the places and stories that inspire them.