Title of work: The Four Horsemen
Technique: Oil on canvas
Format: 139 x 87,5 cm

Artist statement:

I think of my artistic practice as a form of visual archaeology: I scavenge and gather images and fragments of local stories and forgotten histories and then synthesise them into tableaux-like paintings, using the evidence I’ve found to offer up alternative readings of the past and present.
In my paintings I explore the traces of social history that are held in the land. They are full of disjunctures between past and present, fact and fiction, the romantic, the realist and the speculative. My work focusses particularly on notions of history and national identity which are perpetuated on and via “nature", but I am broadly interested in the myth-making which sustains societies and individuals.
In recent works I suggest the instrumentalization of the landscape and its place in collective memory, drawing on personal experience as well as recent and historical events. Working on a large scale and depicting active, at-work figures which dominate their settings both literally and conceptually, I take example from social realist mural painting and early Renaissance fresco works.

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