Edward is mainly interested in painting but also photography and its relationship to painting as a means of recording place or location together with an investigation into the relationship between narrative in photographs and painting. Photographs continue to explore disregarded areas of landscape, ‘empty’ or found space, industrial or abandoned landscape.
Research will investigate the relationship between subject matter and narrative. He is interested in how focus or energy is generated by the ‘banal’ or ‘un-staged’ subject matter in landscape or environment that is ‘not seen’ or hidden.
This energy relates to what Andreas Gursky has referred to as the ‘opposite of authenticity’ in photography, allowing a “picture to develop a life of its own on a two dimensional surface which doesn’t exactly relate to the real object”. (A.Gursky, Fotografien 1994 -98 Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 1998. Text section page 7.
Works Edward has exhibited in the past derive primarily from ‘collage’ or built elements as a starting point and are integrated into a more painterly language. This is ‘abstract’ in its relationship to ground and subject, ‘wrapping’ elements together in the paintings. Contradictory elements are used to create tension in the work – for example the dialogue in a recent painting happens between recognisable forms or fragments of typography or found image sit within an ‘abstract’ language. Colour relationships can be unexpected. Found, random material dictates its own meaning or reading. Edward is interested in the tension between this everyday language and more personal interpretations of environment.