“When making a body of work over the course of several years, many subsidiary themes usually develop and start vying for a place in the finished exhibition. The danger is that too many themes can dilute the main thrust, so a delicate balancing act is required. When I made Post-State (RHA Ashford Gallery, 2022), a series of speculative images imagining what this island would be like after climate chaos has rendered it no longer a nation state, there were several works which explored the relationship between nature and our built environment, with an emphasis on our desire to control and exclude the natural world. The Making Space exhibition has given me an opportunity to go back and assemble a smaller set of the works which focus closely on this theme, and which all share a commonality of colour and tone — a chapter out of the book, as it were.”