space, hope + altered estates

Abstract

“In these new paintings, I continue to explore themes of communities and their dissolution - I use allusions to architecture and places of habitation, such as Britain’s new towns, housing estates and military installations, together with the occupation and civilianisation of contested space through settlement to suggest the uncertainty of human- historical time.” “The work draws upon the materiality of the built environment and its abstract displacement through art as a memory of forms reimagined as a parallel universe. In proposing a simulacrum I wish to question our received notion of authenticity in a world constructed through capitalist neo-liberalism, and imperial economies of power that contribute to the exploitation of national/cultural/r eligious and postcolonial identities. The ambition is for work that may create a sense of recognition counterbalanced by a sense of timelessness, loss, longing, disconnection and melancholy. In so doing I wish to make artworks that seem to arrive as if from another time and place; a potential dissident space where all era’s co-exist.” ANDRE STITT