Exhale

Media: Acrylic painting, Digital art

Year: 2014

Collection: AR in the Garden

Size (H x W): 50cm x 90cm (1 ft 7 ins x 2 ft 11 ins)

Size (W x H): 5344 x 2969 pixels

Moving on from my 2013 AR animation paintings I decided to experiment with video the following year and chose the Edinburgh Botanic Garden as my inspiration. I thought this would provide an interesting platform to covertly embed layers of meaning into what appears, at first, to be quite traditional paintings.

It developed into a series of botanic garden AR paintings with a twist. I collaborated with a film maker to produce short videos filmed in the Edinburgh Botanic Garden with a dark and somewhat sinister feel to them. I was intrigued by the possibility of turning seemingly aesthetically pleasing botanic paintings into something very different once one scans the artwork. Until the painting is digitally engaged the alternate reality will be hidden somewhere ‘inside’ the painting. However, after the video is relayed through the artwork, even when the physical painting is seen at a later date the viewer will still be, on some level, consciously aware of the secondary, more sinister story line – a complete emotional contradiction to what one would expect from a colourful, garden painting.

Exhale was also minted as an NFT to accompany its inclusion in an exhibition and auction in Mexico City in 2024.