‘Highway Anxiety’- Recent Paintings by Shaun Morris

Open 5th December 2017 to 5th February 2018 –

“The paintings I’m exhibiting at the Moseley Exchange represent my interest in exploring the so-called ‘edgelands’ underneath the motorways that pass over the post-industrial landscape of the Black Country. I’ve recently become interested in the many transit hubs and depots that back onto the canals or are dotted alongside the motorway. I’ve become fascinated by their population of parked lorries and other, often strange looking, vehicles.

There is a doomed romantic quality about a life spent travelling on the road which I find embodied in the image of the truck or lorry, yet also there is something vaguely unsettling and menacing in the black windowed cabs at night and in the sheer scale of some of them.  In the paintings I’ve made so far I’ve been experimenting more freely with the painting process to make the trucks look more aged, greasy and dirty. I’m interested in the idea of them looking nostalgic on one hand, and futuristic on the other: parked, seemingly abandoned, at the side of the road, highway or canal in a post-oil world.”

Shaun Morris > www.shaunmorrispaintings.com