Ben Lingard
‘The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.’
(Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities)
I make art that tells stories of the city.
My practice currently weaves together disparate thoughts about psychogeography, the nature of memory and the process of painting.
I am interested in the parallels that I see between the process of dérive (an unplanned and emotionally driven movement through the urban environment) and the act of painting.
How do you capture a moment?
How do you live in the moment when it can only ever be behind you?
My body races ahead and the moment lags; an unknowable buoy that bobs in my wake.
My art is therefore (necessarily and unavoidably), a reinvention. It is a simulacrum of lost times in half-remembered places. It is a re-presentation of an urban drift that stretches ahead of, and also behind me, but which remains tantalisingly, just beyond my grasp.
It is my madeleine.
Website: https://benlingard.art
Instagram: https://instagram.com/ben_lingard_art
Email: ben@benlingard.art
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