David Phillips

When We Remembered The Volcano

Jackson's Art Prize 2026
Acrylic
Panel
60 x 84.2 cm

£4,850

“This quadriptych examines how individuals experience and remember shared events differently, and how those emotional reverberations intersect. I am interested in how landscape events, such as volcanic eruptions, might function as memorial spaces. My practice often combines pictorial images that suggest narrative with physical interventions designed to reframe or activate space. I am an artist with a background in architecture and communication design. My creative practice spans painting, sculpture, and spatial proposals. Allegory is central to my work, which explores communication, memory, and narrative, particularly how environments are transformed into mediums for connection and reflection. My architectural training remains foundational. I explore what occurs when interventions meet natural settings, when a path cuts a field or when objects enter a landscape to stimulate memory and understanding. I place forms as markers or measures, frames or fences, gestures of remembrance. I investigate how abstract objects can gather the character of a place and offer orientation, reflection, or solace. I believe we have yet to find a balance between the emotional intelligence of Romanticism and the pragmatic clarity of modernity. The contemporary environmental movement, too, has yet to recognise the reciprocal relationship between people and the landscapes that shape and sustain us.”