I was having a conversation with someone about buildings. Why I like buildings? What makes me paint them? why particular buildings? the reasons develop and evolve and there are many layers to it.
Buildings have powerful connotations. Notions of identity are strongly linked with building; the places where we are bound.
They are refuges, sanctuary, prisons, cells, palaces. They can be cultural and social signifiers.
Buildings can often be relegated to the background but can also contain all ones private thoughts, memories and emotions:
Within them we live out our lives. Evolving, destroying, living, dying. We love there and lose there.
They aid the construction of our individual identity whilst forming the foundations of society’s common identity.
Ever increasingly buildings are ephemeral and transient objects in our environment. I document these buildings. Fascinated by them. They make my heart sort of stutter, the huge housing estates and the seemingly lack of humanity. How utopia slides so quickly into dystopia. Yet somewhere in these places there are signs of light. A garden on a balcony…attempts of beauty and reform. You have to find something beautiful there so you can live, it may have just been the tree blossoming outside your window…
These places can feel like ghost towns even when they may still full of people. Lonely and sad. Their melancholy I understand. The pathos is a jagged kind of beauty.
