Zones of Transit, 2009 - 2011

Peter Ainsworth.

Sometimes he wonders what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would be merely an encumbrance.

(JG Ballard, 1963)

Ainsworth’s work focuses on particular spaces that are often overlooked within the normative navigation of the city. Areas that are on the peripheries of urban environments but without which the city would not fit together and spaces that are often encountered through car windows but have to be entered into through gaps in railings. Within his work there is a fascination with physical surface: the render of objects that are resplendent in their disorder. His projects develop by spending time walking and researching areas; collecting remnants from sites, making rubbings, or taking photographs. Beyond this however, and what punctuates his work, are concerns of usage of space and the investigating the nature of materiality and object relations within contemporary culture.

He uses spaces such as flyovers or the isosceles of land around retail parks as a studio space, often utilizing the phenomenon of Golden and Blue Hour (the hour before and after sunset) to create works. Central to Ainsworth’s current photographs are pockmarked concrete walls- scuffed, water and sewage stained, “My photographs focus on traces of human activity within the landscape, often depicting physical marks made by unconscious interactions.” It is Ainsworth's “urge to make the familiar strange so that I am able to reveal a new interpretation of lived reality.”