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Shifting Landscape

Visual Art & Photography

via Scotland and Aotearoa New Zealand

Compression Landscapes

An abstract photograph using intentional camera movement, with soft red globes and streaks on the left, yellow sweeping upward through the centre, and deep blue across the upper right, the colours blending into magenta and orange where they meet.
Red & Yellow & Blue

Compression Landscapes is a series of abstract urban photographs made in Auckland in 2023. The works emerged from walking through the city with a mobile camera, using long exposure, intentional camera movement, altered capture, lens distortion and in-camera glitch to transform ordinary urban material into dense fields of colour, light and motion.

Light gathers, smears, flares and breaks apart. Buildings become bands, blocks or unstable structures. Vegetation merges with glare, shadow and digital noise. The city appears not as a single readable place, but as something shifting between landscape, signal, circuitry, spectacle and apparition.

The source material is familiar: traffic, streetlights, signage, buildings, vegetation, road surfaces, evening skies, passing vehicles and fragments of city infrastructure. These things remain present, but they rarely stay fixed. Through movement and compression, they begin to behave less like stable subjects and more like forces passing through the image.

The series sits between photographic observation and painterly abstraction. Colour is heightened and unstable: neon reds, acid greens, electric blues, gold flares, pale clouded whites and bruised dusk tones move through the works as vivid urban atmospheres. Glitch is not used simply as a surface effect. It becomes part of the image’s transformation, along with walking, looking, exposure, lens behaviour, software and light itself.

What remains is still recognisably urban, but shifted into another register. The city is bent, stretched, fractured and reassembled by the conditions of its making. Compression Landscapes holds Auckland as a lived and moving environment: luminous, artificial, unstable, and charged by the moment of encounter.

  • An abstract urban photograph with layered pale blue and white light forms against a deep blue background, with fragmented traces of text and glowing streaks creating a cold, luminous effect.
    Ice Cap
  • Tilted abstract urban image with yellow road markings, a dark fragmented tree canopy, pale sky, and soft lavender, blush and gold light fragments.
    Japanese Landscape
  • A white-gold burst of light explodes through a dark urban field, with red and white trails and a gridded building-like structure at right.
    Heart of Empire

  • Dense abstract field of pale rods, blocks, white flares and blue-black spaces, with curved forms crossing through the centre.
    Fractal Engine
  • Blue and violet abstract urban field with white clustered marks, glowing circular lights and gold rectangular fragments.
    Exploding Colours

  • A soft abstract image in pale blue and violet, with blurred red and gold light trails rising through the lower half and a faint central glowing form.
    Haystack (after Monet)

  • Gold, orange and pink light trails rise in a tornado-like column against a darker urban ground, with small white lights scattered around it.
    Cyclonic Twilight

  • Intense white glare fills the centre, surrounded by red, yellow and white light trails against darker blurred forms.
    Sparklers
  • Abstract spiral of pale gold building-like fragments, white flares, cloud forms and dark blue spaces, with tree-like silhouettes at left.
    Golden Galactic Spiral

  • Abstract urban image with tall pale vertical light streaks, orange and pink structural bands, and blue-lavender sky tones.
    Neon Stripes
  • An abstract photograph with a large pale blue and lavender wave-like form sweeping across the frame, bordered by bright fractured light trails and softer mauve and violet tones.
    Great Wave (after Hokusai)
  • Dark urban roadside with a burst of white sparkling lights, green vertical light forms on the left, and a pale tree-like mass dissolving on the right.
    Sparkle Lights

  • Large pale cloud-like forms fill the upper frame above darker urban fragments, with bright white light entering from the right.
    Behold the Sky
  • Abstract night photograph featuring cascading horizontal ribbons of white, yellow and blue light against a deep purple background. Vertical streaks of bright green light intersect the scene, creating a woven plaid pattern with scattered red accents near the bottom edge.
    Light Plaid
  • Gold Bar

  • Dense abstract field of pale vertical rods, white flares and turquoise dots gathering into a central pile-up against dark blue-black space.
    Pile Up
  • Pale textured clouds descend over a dark cityscape, broken by glitch-like white structures and muted blue shadows.
    Shimmering Cloud

• ICM •