Statement Autumn 2010
My work is concerned with the use, politics and abstract qualities of space.
In some of my work, particularly my photography, this expresses itself as an exploration of how the spaces we create around ourselves become tableaux that reflect the human condition: aspiration, anxiety, love, humour, grief, anger, folly and so on.
In other work, most visibly in my painting, space is considered in a more abstract way. In this I explore spatial possibilities within the formal elements of painting, many of which emerge as competing dualities. For example: relationships between pictorial space and actual physical space, in the form of depth or layers, or the picture surface and objects placed upon it; and those between colours, forms, lines, edges and zones of particular kinds of paint handling that can suggest hints of pictorial depth or relative location.
Of course, even abstract painting cannot escape connotation. It is this inevitability and the fact that things seen in the environment can be triggers for ideas in the first place that reconnect the second type of work to the first. However, abstract painting remains more open and leaves more space both for creative exploration for myself as the artist and for subjective interpretation on the part of the viewer.
Stephen Riley