CHIMERA

Chimera is one of the works that followed a brief experience of visiting the former ‘Jungle’ camp, Calais in January 2016, and finding my way through the expanse of tents where people were making their temporary homes. It is based on some of the structures that I saw, but the drawing is a composite of these, and not presented as an accurate record of reality. The first layer of the work was made by making prints from the kinds of vegetables and fruits that people were preparing for meals there, a vital daily activity that have become central and essential to life for displaced people in Northern France. Formally, It’s part of a group of current experiments in which surfaces are over-laid in various ways with the very subtle reflective media of mica/pearl lustre. It is only visible with certain lights and angles, but can also be interpreted in various ways by the viewer such as in oil on water spectrum, or perhaps tiny flecks of coloured light within the computer screen that can separate us from the threat or even joys of physical reality.