Artist Statement

Concrete Island depicts walls that support a flyover of the A406 (a ring road in the suburbs of North London). The project’s title refers to a JG Ballard novel of the same name in which an architect becomes stranded between intersecting motorways after a car crash: a modern interpretation of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

The photographs are all shot in the same location, an edge space entered in to through a gap in the railings. The site is surrounded on all sides by roads. It exists in a footprint of an overpass, an uninhabited isosceles of land with no specific social designation other than as waste.

Ainsworth describes his approach to the subject matter of Concrete Island as “akin to archaeology. The process of photographing thus becomes a means to decipher the previous inhabitation of the site.  In this context I intend the images to draw the viewer’s intention to marks that are often overlooked in the navigation of the built environment: a reflection on the spaces we occupy both physically and emotionally.”

Artist Bio

Peter Ainsworth’s work explores how various structures, aesthetics and social interactions form the complex urban environment that surrounds us. His photographs focus on traces of human activity within the landscape, often depicting physical marks made by unconscious interactions and sculptural forms re-contextualised within the frame of the image.

“What unifies my approach to photography”, he writes, “is a concentration on sites that are in flux, and the urge to make the familiar strange.”

Ainsworth is a recipient of the Dazed and Confused Emerging Artist Award 2010 and a awarded a Flash Forward Award 2010. His work has been exhibited at major galleries around the world, for example, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. It has also been published in Dazed and Confused and is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Art, Houston.

For further information please see http://www.peterainsworth.co.uk/