My main areas of research are travel, tourism, colonialism, post-colonialism and the politics of representation. These seemingly disparate elements are combined to provoke discourses surrounding fiction and reality. The paintings create parallels with nineteenth century colonialism and twenty-first century tourism as well as highlighting the importance and significance of colonial artefacts in the historical development of modern art.
Tourism is one of the largest industries in the world and has arguably had the most influence on First World perceptions of utopia such as white, sandy beaches, clear blue sea, simplicity and adventure couched in luxury.
Tourism has the propensity to mask realities such as poverty, poor infrastructure, and dictatorship. The all�inclusive resort and the heavily structured guided tour itineraries cherry pick and conceal these realities.
The reference material I utilise is mainly derived from second hand holiday brochures, travel books and anthropological books. These hyper real images often have a stage-managed and retouched appearance with artificially intense colours.
I often use reproduction of nineteenth century reportage etchings from the London Illustrated News and satirical magazines such as Punch. The etching marks create an all-over reactive surface contrast with images derived from holiday brochures and travel books. This functions as a kind of spoiler that collapses the historical and contemporary concept of utopia both as luxury and imperialism and turns the spectator into a faux tourist and the art work into a souvenir object � namely a fetish of the experience.
The paintings have been influenced particularly by Sigmar Polke�s mid-1980�s paintings. I am interested in Polke�s ability to integrate social -political issues with the politics of representation. Many of my paintings are multi-layered, constructed as an art historical archaeological dig into socio-political histories. By isolating elements of the heavily patterned "African" fabric with images taken from holiday brochures the paintings strategically push and pull the relationships between layers.
