This series appropriates colour postcards featuring people looking across nostalgic picturesque landscapes with the addition of an anachronistic hovering silver orb. The figures on the postcard are captivated by this alien object from the future. The semi-reflective plastic disc promises to reveal insights into the onlookers destiny or that of our own.
2021
The Time Machine (Splendour in the Rockies)
The Time Machine (Great Langdale, Cumbria)
The Time Machine (Perranporth, Cornwall)
The Time Machine (Widemouth Bay)
The Time Machine (The Blue Pool, Near Wareham, Dorset)
Selected from a collection of late 20th century used postcards, each work is hand-painted by the artist to create idealistic representations of a celestial sky. The pre-sent cards have personal messages on the reverse written by an unknown sender who is long-gone. The adaptation of the cards imagines that they have been sent from heaven forming a communication with the afterlife. The words take on new meaning and conjure fanciful ideas of heaven that brings to mind post-war romantic cinematic depictions such as in Powell and Pressburger’s film A Matter of Life and Death (1946).
Unique postcards, acrylic paint, 2021 (dimensions variable)
All is going very well here, the food is good and most of the sessions are worthwhile.
Arrived safe and well. Palatial hotel, terrific weather, excellent service. Everyone speaks English.
Everything OK. Making the most of this life of doing nothing. Some changes since we were here, but I think you will find your way about when you come.
We arrived safely. Weather has been fine. Nice hotel we have got our own shower. Fellowship is lovely and food is nice.
Installation with various postcard works
2019
Climbing Through a Postcard
2019
This is a Real Colour Photograph
2019
Postcards for Westfield re-imagines the 2013 terrorist attack at the Westgate Shopping Centre in Nairobi by transposing it to Westfield Stratford City in East London. The work takes the form of four limited-edition postcards, borrowing from Edwardian disaster postcards that once circulated images of coal mine explosions and other public tragedies. Like those earlier objects, these postcards sit uncomfortably between commemoration and consumption, asking how catastrophe becomes something that can be collected, posted or casually handled.
The project also draws on Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire (1965–68), where an image of a burning public building is presented with deadpan objectivity while remaining eerily unsettling. In a similar way, the familiar form of the shopping mall is seen as calm, ordinary and seemingly intact as it shows signs of imagined violence. This approach connects to contemporary landscape photography that treats built environments as charged political spaces rather than neutral backdrops. By relocating an attack from Nairobi to East London, the work questions authenticity, empathy and Western distance, exposing how everyday culture consumes trauma.
Limited edition of 25, each one individually numbered, 2014
