Fatal Intersections presents a series of anonymous faces: faces many people the world over have seen once before at some point, but don’'t realise it. They were seen and maybe scrutinised for a day, perhaps a week, and then the faces themselves became forgotten and as unknown as before. All that remained was an overwhelming sense of tragedy, and the generalised horror of seeing random victims of terror.

 

In a profoundly disturbing echoing, these small paintings were hung on the day yet another atrocity took place in Brussels.

 

Social media originally provided the images. ‘Selfies’' which would have been taken in happier times, with no foreshadowing of the tragedy that would result in each tiny image being lost in a sea of media images in November 2015. Usually reduced in reproduction to grainy black and white, they became palimpsests of loss. Through my re-working of these portraits, the anonymous victims are once again a focus of scrutiny and remembering.

 

My work explores notions of absurdity and incongruity in contemporary urban society. Mostly it highlights the banal, and out-of-place. Usually it is untroubling albeit often provoking feelings of dissonance. In the case of Paris and Brussels and similar events worldwide, the banal ordinariness of the urban environment prompts a new perspective on the normal everyday. Everything and everyone is a threat to someone somewhere, although not in any rational way. The terror is random, and yet not. Everyday becomes hazard.