The Waste Land

The Wasteland was inspired by sketches made in the Business Lounge at Hong Kong International Airport during the height of the COVID lockdown. I was travelling back to Australia on one of the few international flights operating at the time, and the normally crowded airport was almost completely empty. A place designed for movement and human interaction had become strangely silent, creating an atmosphere of isolation and foreboding.

Rather than attempting to document the airport, I was drawn to the experience of the place: the vast areas of darkness, the geometric architecture, the cold light beyond the windows and the intense shaft of artificial light cutting through the gloom. A solitary figure provides a small but important reminder of human presence.

The title is a quiet nod to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, whose themes of fragmentation, isolation and a world temporarily stripped of meaning seemed particularly appropriate.

The painting has also made me reflect on something increasingly important in my work: light defines a place; memory shapes the way we depict it. What remains with us is rarely the whole scene, but a few fragments of light, colour, form and atmosphere. Sometimes those fragments are enough.