Mark Surridge’s paintings reveal traces, signs and veils. Making work from specific sites, each site ‘mapped’, remembered and transformed into works of ‘equivalence of experience’.The paintings suggest aspects of archaeology; images appear half excavated in the paint, revealing hidden codes and syntaxes. Some of the canvases are divided into two parts, suggesting the passing of accumulated time or the movement of an ultra violet scanning device, searching for meaning.

He uses the principles of the palimpsest to look at the world, the most distant layers erased or partially erased by the ones in front, the landscape can be seen as a series of elements, pictorial, psychological and metaphorical.

Surridge’s recent work ‘Flora and Flotsam’ has taken him to Still Life observational painting, looking at the relationships between colour, form and composition.
“I wanted the paintings to feel immediate and to have emphasis on colour contrast - bright natural and bright synthetic.”