Looking at looking, The poor hospital, up then down, out there, not working

Full description

Research background In his 1997 essay, 'The Ultimate Departure Lounge', the British writer J. G. Ballard wrote: 'Airports have become a new kind of discontinuous city... I suspect that the airport will be the true city of the 21st century. The great airports of the planet are already the suburbs of an invisible world capital, a virtual metropolis whose faubourgs are named Heathrow, Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle, Nagoya, a centripetal city whose population forever circles its notional centre, and will never need to gain access to its dark heart.' This series of works poses the question: do we pause to consider what effect generic urban environs, efficient and efficiently blank spaces, have on us? How are we shaped by these vast 'unnoticed' structures that play so large a role in our lives? Research contribution These paintings provide metaphorical readings of contemporary society, forming as representations of ciphers embodying change and entropy, poised between being and not being and functioning as signs evoking contemporaneity. This work forms as a fiction that 'allows us to imagine our world differently, and as such it offers escape routes... from our representational and often over stratified sense of self' (O'Sullivan, Art encounters Deleuze and Guattari : thought beyond representation. 2006, p. 29). The imagery in this work forms as a kind of symptom of disorganisation and resembles what Gilles Deleuze calls a 'zone of indeterminacy' (Deleuze, Francis Bacon : the logic of sensation. 2005, p.16) due to it existing as an in-between of states, a becoming that is not 'finished'. Research significance These paintings were a contribution to an exhibition selected by the curator, Anna-Louise Rolland, (Director of Leipzig International Artist Programme) investigating the current state of art in relation to spaces. Inclusion in this artist residency and exhibition was through an international peer selection process.