Since leaving school and escaping from studying a degree in Chemical Physics after the first year, some twenty(ish) years ago, I've had a couple of different careers, mostly involving playing around with spreadsheets, graphs and numbers. So, my background is not really arts-orientated. However, I have always enjoyed photography and design and more recently have been looking at the boundary areas of the 'logical' aspects of life with the 'human' areas - in particular I am interested in maps and schematic diagrams. Generally I believe that good design follows function rather than 'prettiness'. So, my car, to give one example, is an old Land Rover, which whilst not particularly practical for me, is in my opinion stylish simply because it makes no concession to style, and it is purely functional (see figure 1).
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| Fig. 1. The highly stylised design of a brick and a landrover |
As I've already said, I also like maps and schematic diagrams - of which Beck's tube map is a beautiful example. When underground you don't need to know distances - in fact you can't usually gauge them - what is important is the logical relationship of lines and stations to each other, and that is done far more easily once you take out all the wiggles and bits of real geography. One of the projects I have recently done, partly to learn how to use some of the functiosn in Adobe Illustrator, is a 'tube map' of the overland journeys I've done (figure 2).
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| Fig. 2. An early version of 'Overland'; my interpretation of Beck's tube map with my over-land journeys |
Anyway, moving swiftly on... I've been doing photograhy for a number of years now (nearly 30 to be nearly precise) and being a bit of an anorak (the map fetish, Land Rover and willingness to spend dozens of hours recreating a form of tune map should have given that game away) a lot of the photography was related to transport of some sort. This anorakness got me into travelling around Europe by train, and then gradually further afield - not necessarily by train. As can be seen in my 'Overland' map I've done a fair bit of travelling now, and my latest journey from Nairobi to Johannesburg isn't even on that version of the map. So the photography spread into more travel related areas, and I then started experimenting more and more.
When my day job ran out of steam due to Government cutbacks, I thought that it was probably time I had a look at developing my artistic side a bit more, and to try and get a more rounded understanding of art. So I enrolled at the UCF, handily located a mile from my front-door, and that is where I am now.
