Dan Harland West Yorkshire, United Kingdom

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I am a painter based in Leeds, UK. I use memories of places and imagined spaces to create compositions of colour, line and form. I see these compositions as pieces of another world which I have named Alio. Alio is a world of isolation; where the viewer is invited to place themselves inside and explore their own imagination.

Alio is the fictional world which inhabits my paintings. The word ‘Alio’ is Latin for ‘elsewhere’ which describes the state of mind my work represents and intends to create in an audience. Sometimes Alio is tranquil and sometimes it is turbulent.

Alio is the result of the chaotic relationship between memory and imagination. Forming a fictional environment cannot be from thin air, it can only be informed by past experiences. You can only visualise a tree because you have seen a tree and understand the concept of a tree. Those experiences could be personally lived or experienced through others (via paintings, film, literary fiction etc). As my own personal influences are, I assume, fairly commonplace, my work creates a familiarity. This familiarity, however, is kept from reaching full literal recognition and remains at an eerie distance due to the inaccuracy and inaccessibility of my personal, limited, memory collage. I enjoy working in this space and I feel there is a lot of potential in this push and pull between the alien and the familiar.

I work by applying layers of paint; sometimes in flat blocks of colour and sometimes in a more fluid, textured application. I limit myself to a few select colours and usually vertical and horizontal gestures as I enjoy the abstraction this creates as well as the restrictions I put on myself. A few rules makes the creative process easier. I set myself these rules to avoid being too literal with the marks I make. I enjoy letting the forms come through in as random a fashion as possible, avoiding letting my conscious mind dominate my instincts. If a random form begins to remind me of a plausible environment, then I carry on down that path, accentuating the narrative as it is revealed to me. Alio is about isolation, which has both positive and negative connotations and means different things for different people. I want each viewer to come to my work and experience the environments as if solitarily dropped into them. Maybe to gaze peacefully towards the edge of the world or to be slapped across the face by the wind and rain as they navigate the wilderness.