Victoria Stanway

I paint landscapes from fading memories. My biggest challenge is to convey these fleeting images and the feelings associated with them, into a finished piece.

My current series of work entitled Visual Echo's strive to capture colour and contrast from the grey industrial north west where I grew up.

Recollecting bogs and fields, the patchworks of allotments and pastures, that all seem to have been drained of life, as if their time has already passed and they are steadily, slowly fading away. In some way I have been trying to capture that process, not only in the countryside, but also in the region's towns.

My paintings explore the patterns that appear to lie beneath all this and show - using a wider lens- the way the fields, farms and factories have somehow become intertwined, with much of humanity's work dwarfed by the half-deserted hilly landscapes.

Paradoxically, I attempt to show the way that even these often bleak and empty landscapes are crowded with information and can be brought to life. I look at my paintings and imagine that they represent archaeological layers. Era is compacted onto era, with industry encroaching upon agriculture and everything eventually fading into the emptiness of the horizon.