ARTIST IN RESIDENCE
Budapest 2018 As artist in residence I ‘documented’ the vacant lots in Budapest. I wondered about their histories and futures, but their present also had presence, expressing something about Pest’s identity and inner consciousness. The sharp angles, brickwork firewalls, and sense of both enclosure and openness – they are a defining feature of Pest. The paintings were built with pages of a Communist-era travel book describing the historic/architectural tourist sites of Hungary: Magyarorszag Utikonyvek. Strips were cut and tinted (text remains visible) and then used to build up the space, consisting of strong perspectives and elements of human presence.
Novi Sad 2022 This Serbian city has an appealing old town at its heart and an interesting urban fabric with openings and passages that weave a pedestrian experience at ground level, both in the old town and the residential areas beyond. I challenged myself to use watercolour to represent these bright open spaces and then came to add collage to take the ‘traditional’ edge off, but also to capture the deep tones of the dark passages. I like to combine contrasts – such as realism with abstraction, nature with architecture, small scale with large scale – so this combination provided an interesting duo: extreme light and dark contrasts, and incorporating enclosed and open spaces within a single plane.
Athens 2024 One of the first things that caught my eye in Athens is all the balconies of the polikatoikia (apartments), which are themselves interesting because they tell the story of how buildings transformed the lives of many Athenians – a topic I'm always drawn to. The Athenian balcony is its own little universe, with endless architectural variations and endless ways of dressing them with plants and personality. There is a lot of pride involved in the Greek balcony, and they tell us things about who lives there and about life in the city. In other words: architecture at a human scale.
