Terra Paintings 2005

Iceland

The Terra paintings are part of a series of paintings I made with the idea of manifestations of abstract and silent topographical landscapes and aerial views of locations plotting an almost atavistic (primitive) memory of place. A chaos of colour and energy-splashed paint interrupts and belies this aerial view of a deliberate and choreographed surface, yet both are held captive by grid-like markings.

The title of each individual work is embedded within the painting. Stamped and archived as a choregraphical sign of survey each repeated word functions in several ways. The functions are as painted mark, as image, and as ambiguous interruption to the landscape’s silence. This latter, the interruption, is an imperative imposed on the observer, the sounds of the title or words forms and reverberates willy-nilly in the brain’s language centre because words insist on their will to be read.

So ultimately these paintings are not images of topographical landscapes nor yet maps. However, there is the element of charting both familiar and unfamiliar territory, an activity demanded by each new and pristine canvas.

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