Three themes from the visual culture and the built environment of the seventeenth century inform my current works. These are: the Baroque formal garden; the style of fortress architecture known as the bastionated polygon; and quadratura (illusionistic ceiling painting). Such apparently disparate forms are linked in that they each manipulate the perception of space in order to entice and disorient the viewer. Our era, with its emphasis on spectacle and excess, luxury and violence, consumption and inequality, has also been described as 'baroque'. In these images I use perspective, distortion, repetition and symmetry to evoke a space which is entrapping and repelling by turns. Places which are part garden, part fortress, part death-star; an allegory, if you like, of our place in the world.
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Hortus (in)conclusus. An unclosed garden disclosed. A garden which cannot be concluded; a garden unbound and unbounded. An inconclusive garden, occluded, clouded, ocular. A not-garden. An undecidable garden... perhaps.