Hovercraft

"The paintings in Hovercraft started out as a visual interpretation of a
specific strip of commercial development. My idea was to compress
pictorial elements into a shape that might resemble a mirage or entity
made up of, and referring to, my experience of these details of place.
In doing so I hoped to make something that felt vital...that gets in
under the skin.

"The works that adhere to this concept of forced grouping took on a
personality of their own in a slightly unexpected way. Whereas some
of the earlier examples were influenced by the look of illuminated
manuscripts, some of the work that appears in this exhibition have been
made with the feeling that they could coalesce into a hovering machine-
type thing. The origin of this idea came about when a friend commented
that the silhouette of one of the gathered shape areas resembled a
motorcycle.

"I realized that the idea of keeping the viewer within this circuitous central
shape had created something a little different than I initially considered and
also something whose meaning I still feel slightly unaware of. In a way
these paintings are objects of an experience in that they still rely on the
visual cues of depth perception.

"Several works in the exhibition lean more towards landscapes situated
within the landscape of developed commercialism. These ones are built
on a premise of making more heightened and tangible something that
is vague and hard to pin down, like the experience of visual sensation,
against a backdrop of concrete forms."

Gary Evans, November 2007