“Liminal reflects a fascination with time and the built environment, while querying the environmental and physiological ramifications of city living. I try to draw the viewer through an imaginative timescale that encompasses future or past built environments – utopian and dystopian – and the layered pasts I feel we still inhabit.
“Any future vision should attempt to communicate with and through the thousands of years of history that precedes it, from Indigenous understandings and uses of place through to contemporary migrant experiences. I aim to create images that work both away and towards, into past and future, using fusion and decay. There are tensions between natural and built environments, between moving forward and being still, between the living and the dead.
“In its strong attention to the vanishing point, always an invitation to enter the work, I believe works of place addresses just such tensions. The fractal or jigsaw structure asks the viewer to be conscious of built environments as constructed spaces in time, and to push toward their own vision. How do we create a future for the city that understands its history and takes responsibility for the past and for future generations? What new custodial relationships will be needed for a changing climate? I believe it is the role of the artist to contemplate such questions” – Tom Buchanan
