Stephen Copland

"My research as an artist is interdisciplinary and over the years has focused on themes of cultural heritage, diaspora and recently on human rights and the environment. Nature and its representation as a political image interests me as well as the various interpretations of the coast in the 21st century.

In my "book" paintings I seek a type of mystical and poetic vision of the landscape and memory where there is no darkness, only light, and a sense of the supernatural, meditative and hypnotic that transcends the passing moment.

Opening the viewer to the realm of the psychological, the book paintings become the stage to express a theatre of emotion dealing with a discourse on love and loss, absence and presence." (Artist statement, 2008)