Birthplaces

The Birthplaces series of artworks takes as its starting point the place of birth of specific figures, within historic and contemporary society, that have had a positive or negative relationship to the development of abstraction. Utilising maps and aerial views of each location of birth, the artist James Scott Brooks, responds to the cartography of that area through a symbolic & aesthetic selection process of particular buildings and landmarks. The birthplaces series is an attempt to discuss ideas around the 2 dimensional representation of 3 dimensional space through the languages of topography and geometric abstraction, thus, critiquing and extending the seemingly formal/ autonomous language of modernist abstraction. Furthermore, each artwork responds to the visual language of relevant abstract paintings from the history of art. To date, birthplace artworks have been realised for a number of artists, writer and civil servant.