My paintings are adventurous journeys into complex and uncertain spatial worlds. Currently we seem to be at a crux point of rapid change: a city bursts into existence, a natural event tears it down; economic systems flourish and collapse; political entities rise and fall. At the same time these physical and social structures have evolved away from relatively simple arrangements into complex systems. My aim is to present the viewer with a visual experience that challenges them to confront the multidimensional, and indeterminate character of the contemporary situation.

I am currently working on two interrelated projects:

CONSTRUCTS – The space that these works inhabit is one of experimentation. Within this aperture I explore new pictorial solutions through the combination of traditional painting, with digital technologies and architectural practices – merging contemporary and historic media.

My intention is to construct new possibilities for abstraction that relate to contemporary innovations in science and technology. The geometry of these works is therefore multifarious, fractured, and uncertain – drawing upon theories of complexity, chaos, and quantum mechanics. I am not interested in directly illustrating models of science or its data, rather in imagining visual metaphors for complex systems of information, and structure.

CITIES – This project is centred on themes of exploration, mental-mapping, globalization and urbanism. Each painting considers the cultural, and architectural landscape of a specific city. During my sojourn, I use tourism – walking, cycling, and public transit – as both a subject matter, and a methodology. Throughout my excursions I examine and photograph the structural environments of these complex worlds.

Digital photographs, Tokyo, Shanghai, Vancouver, 2009.

As a tourist my reading of the city probes the surface, reducing it to a series of transient experiences, and viewpoints – racing from one vista to the next, like a competitor on the CBS series The Amazing Race – akin to watching episodes of Lonely Planet, or Pilot Guides. Out of this mobility, I may generate a psychogeographical conception of the urban-landscape that is composed of disparate experiences. These fragmented events, locations, and structures are later reassembled in my paintings to form an imaginary-geography.