A world in which we surround ourselves with increasingly autonomous machines provides the backdrop for my art. Whether in everyday surveillance or in remote control warfare, as our technological achievements become ever more impressive, our reigns on our creations seem to become flimsier. My landscape paintings show post-apocalyptic scenery devoid of human presence beneath skies still swarming with drones and watchful satellites. Elsewhere, hulking engines take on a life of their own, hovering in mid-air. Discarded ejection seats, still bearing imprints of their former occupants, take centre-stage in life-size ‘portraits’. But there are also attempts to quantify, collect and control: squadrons of paper aircraft silhouettes, pinned behind glass among insect specimens, serve as ambivalent records of both human progress and sacrifice.

 
Scale and intricacy are important to me. An old engine, for instance, has a compelling presence through its sheer bulk, yet when examined up close it reveals fragile, skin-like textures complete with battle scars. These attributes are even more obvious – and somehow touching – on objects engineered around the human form, like the pilot seats in my ‘Reign’ series.

 
Though primarily a painter, I also make objects: for example, an original Martin Baker ejection seat transformed into a mountain landscape inhabited only by oversized beetles and moths. I use both traditional (oil on canvas, panels or glass) and experimental materials (resin, found objects, model-making supplies), and work from miniature scale up to large canvases of over two metres wide.

Brought up in Luxembourg, I graduated with an MA Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh in 2004. I now work at the Jamaica Street Artists studio complex in Bristol.

 
Courtesy of the artist’s website.