Fragments Against Ruin

Originally commissioned for a public outdoor art week in the North Pennines the making of the painting was witnessed by people visiting Dryburn Moor chimneys in Allendale over a period of two days. Over the following months and years I developed it along a strange path that incorporated a trompe d’oeil electric wall socket and laser printed microscope images of pollen grains. The actual chimney in the foreground is shorter than the one in the painting which is more of a natural ruin than a preserved monument to lead mining and lead production. As a fragment of the past it occurred to me suddenly that this could be like a Roman wall painting similar to the ones being unearthed and preserved by archeologists in Herculaneum and Pompeii, so I painted a deep red background wall surface on which appears two plaster fragments of a wall painting. The wall socket is an enigma and obviously an early 21st century everyday plastic object so there is a conflation of different times.