The Great End (still) - 2006

Through the Gaia Project video-works I am attempting to ‘re-work’ the canonical imagery associated with British Romantic painting.

The work of British ‘pre-industrial’ era landscape artists was created with a concern for ideas and issues such as: academic artistic tradition, land ownership, recreation, the ‘picturesque’, personal, local and national identity. My work shares very similar concerns (historically) but also reflects more contemporary attitudes and interpretations of the ‘landscape’ subject related to: environmental pollution, ecological conservation, urban encroachment, land misuse, sustainable systems etc. The Gaia Project invites a subtle ‘re-interpretation’ of landscape by uniting traditional pre-industrial (romantic) ideas with modern ‘environmental’ concerns.


Although the Gaia artworks attempt to capture the topographical characteristics, changing qualities of light and the ephemeral weather conditions of the locations, I regard them more as paintings (or ‘video paintings’) rather than specifically as ‘videos’. These images essentially have more in common aesthetically with landscape painting for three key reasons: 1) Static ‘framed’ image (even though produced in a time-based media), 2) Due to the fact that these are not high definition images (in digital terms) they appear abstractly more ‘painterly’ and visually textured, 3) Rigorous ‘composition‘ employed in each image.

Ideally these works are intended to be displayed as large-scale ‘wall size’ installations in order to emphasise their dramatic qualities. A certain amount of patience and sustained curiosity is required to be invested by the viewer - they are invited to engage in a subtly ‘temporal’ experience.


Each Gaia image has unique characteristics different from the next. One may possess strong ‘atmospheric’ qualities due to rapidly changing light and weather, whereas another may appear very ‘still’ but have a strong topographic compositional quality. It must be stressed that I do not regard these images as accurate recordings of specific places, spaces and times. I prefer them to be seen merely as ‘representations’ of a particular experience. In a deliberate attempt to emphasize the idea of a kind of pastoral organic purity these landscapes or 'wildernesses' are devoid of any human presence and any (obvious) human intervention.

Invariably these images are not necessarily ‘ends in themselves’. They are the product of a much larger process. More specifically this process is the act of walking through landscapes and exploring natural phenomena- ‘being’ in a place and interacting with the land in a physical way (inextricably linked to my Earthworks). In most cases the process in which I am engaged, in retrospect is ephemeral, hidden and un-recorded. Only the images exist as a kind of ‘trace’ of the act.