Imagined Island Places

As an Englishman who has lived and worked in Dominica for many years, I’ve always experienced the island partly as an insider and partly as an outsider. My art and my writing come from that position.

I’m interested in the space between the recognisable and the absurd, and in what can happen when an ordinary place is altered by something that doesn’t quite belong. The influence of Expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism is present in the distortion of form, the flattening and rearrangement of space, and the intrusion of the unexpected.

There is humour in the sketches and paintings, but also something more uneasy. On a tropical island, human constructions can seem wonderfully permanent while nature is quietly working against that illusion. The forest, the sea, the rain, the wind and the creatures we build around and upon will ultimately outlast what we make. Sometimes they simply find a way inside.

My artworks are therefore not intended as representations of Dominica, but as imagined places arising from my experience of it. They are fragments of an island that is both familiar and invented.