Painting place: picturing experience and feeling in the urban landscape

Identifying with the field of representational painting, this project investigates the embedded complexities in urban landscape that can be experienced and communicated to provide a greater understanding of place. Through two main foci: articulations of place and contemporary landscape painting, I aim to question how the experiences of place can contribute to the construction of evocative spaces through urban landscape painting.

The urban and suburban places I choose as focus in this project are ones that are familiar, experienced, passed through and lived in. They can be at times digressive and changing in either incremental ways or dramatic unexpected transitions. My interest in the urban landscape originates from my own tactile experiences of time spent in these places both in an early part of my life and in current daily experience.

Within this project I reference examples by contemporary and historical artists who use painting and photography to explore representations of place, including Pierre Huyghe, Roni Horn, Antonio López García and George Shaw. The consideration of visual representation of place through painting has required an understanding of facture and materiality to unfold evocative practical, poetic and psychological connections. My principal concerns with place are based in experience, memory, feeling and tactile interaction. I use painting to explore these themes through elements such as scale, composition, tonality and colour, manipulating the material of paint to unfold the non-physical and physical experience of place.

I draw on the research of social anthropologists, philosophers, theorists and writers to delineate the broad possibilities of place; particularly how understandings of place impact identity and belonging in a rapidly changing world. The understanding of place in contemporary and historical thought is defined through the time spent in, and the embedded experiences of place. Personal experience and collective societal understandings of urban place are vital to the tactile understandings elaborated in this project.

The writing of aesthetic theorist and architect Lars Spuybroek has been a key influence in terms of sensing and feeling the urban environment through the conceptual and physical construction of images to create sympathies with the urban landscape. In this project I particularly focus on how the perceptible and fragile complexities of our experience of being in an urban landscape can be mediated. I represent and manipulate the known experiences of a place shifting emphasis between the physical objective facts of the space and subjective remembered experiences of time spent in the space.

This creative project uses the medium of paint to investigate and provide insights into the representation of place through four series of paintings that explore the complex aspects of place. These series’ provide the basis for exploring and articulating notions of place to create original understandings of the complex matterings of place in the genre of contemporary representational landscape painting.