I am a visual artist based in Crieff, Scotland. My practice is an evolving, painterly interrogation of light, shadow, and surface.

Although my projects usually start and end with words, I work instinctively, searching for beauty in the mundane and overlooked. I play with surface, light and shadow and see abstraction as a way to reveal the hidden stories of things.

My In Praise Of Shadows and other Transitional Spaces series are interrogations of the interaction of natural light and shadow on the surfaces and geometric shapes found in interiors and in particular, the corridors, stairs and other between spaces of buildings where art is displayed, or made.

This obsession with liminal spaces goes back to when, as an architecture student in the 70’s, I realised that buildings could be conceived like a poem, a novel, or a piece of music, with a backstory, a narrative and a message. And so, became fascinated with entrances, seeing the linear process of entering a building as an opportunity to slowly reveal its story. Corridors and stairs then became places where this narrative could be further developed over time. So perhaps, it is these lost stories I was still searching for in these projects.

In April 2016 I had a heart attack, which also affected my eyes,  leaving me with a very reduced area of focus – a bit like looking at the world through a macro lens. It is this personal experience that is the subject of the In The Broken Places series where I search for beauty in those places, or things, that have played, or continue to play, a part in my treatment and recovery and found myself, yet again, exploring the liminal.

This transition from finding to making now defines my practice. My work begins in the studio with detritus—scraps of paper, fragments of previous works, found objects—assembled into delicate, transient structures on a small tabletop stage. These ephemeral forms exist only to be transformed by light. Using coloured gels and working intuitively, I paint with light.  Each piece is captured entirely in-camera, with only refinements to hue and tone.

Recent projects—Liminal Constructs and Discarded Moments—extend this process. The final image becomes a record of transformation: a fleeting, constructed reality poised between presence and absence, fragility and strength, the discarded and the beautiful.

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I am a graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, BArch (Hons), an elected Professional Artist Member of both the Society of Scottish Artists (SSA), and Visual Arts Scotland (VAS), and a member of the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, the Society of Scottish Architect Artists and Glasgow Print Studio. 

Philip J Lavery 

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