Ben Lingard

I make art that tells stories. Sometimes these are stories of the city , sometimes these are stories about painting. Sometimes they are both.

My recent work 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 activity of dérive (unplanned and emotionally driven urban walking) and the act of painting.

My art is an autobiographical drift through past and present. It is the piecing together of an uncertain cartography of half-remembered and never-happened memories; a non-sequential line of (im)possible moments.

How do you capture a moment? How do you even 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 (re)invention; a simulacrum of lost-times in half-remembered places. It is the re-presentation of an urban drift that stretches ahead and behind, but which remains tantalisingly just beyond my grasp.

It is my Madeleine.

I make work that wanders a line somewhere between figuration and abstraction. Drawing is the bedrock of my practice and I work in a range of media including painting, printmaking and film making.