For a new series of paintings I will be driving round the M25 visiting sites of late 80’s and early nineties raves, with a portable smoke machine.

By using the smoke machine in the contemporary landscape I discover on the trip, I will reflect on past events but also be looking at the present through a psychogeographical lens.

The paintings will explore hauntology - the idea of cultural ideas from the past overshadowing the possibility of newness and innovation in the present.

Rave culture terrified the establishment so much that they legislated it out of existence following the Castlemorton Common Festival in 1992. It marked the end of a truly exciting pop cultural moment. Now it seems the neoliberal consensus has trapped our cultural landscape in a perpetual present. We are dominated by film remakes, popular music struggles for originality, and capitalist forces relentlessly commodify nostalgia.

These paintings will give a visual form to this pervasive sense of cultural haunting.