DESERT LINES

A series of photographs made in Southern California and Arizona between 2010 and 2012. He became beguiled by the calligraphy of movement, of worn painted markings on dark tarmac, of roadside desert drying in natural, honeycomb patterns, of how a straight, marked road relates to a far-off mountain profile. The artist exposes the changes in surfaces, naturally and intentionally engendered, moderating appearances “man lays tarmac, nature changes it and man lays another layer. Eustace recognised an affinity with the Buddhist aesthetic of wabi-sabi which embraces the concept of asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, austerity, intimacy and ‘the ingenious integrity of natural objects and processes.’ From this the happenstance of visual links allowed him to recognise the essential consistency in his own work: drying sand on a Harris beach and the black pitch repairs of heat cracks on a dead-flat highway linked by a common aesthetic and the artist’s decision to make them permanent.

- GUY PEPLOE