An exhibition of work by Ben Lingard

Monday 9 January - Friday 27 March

Opening Event: Friday 9 January, 5pm - 7pm

I make art that tells stories—sometimes of the city, sometimes of painting itself, and sometimes both at once.

My recent work weaves together thoughts on psychogeography, the nature of memory, the process of painting, and the growing influence of generative AI. I am drawn to the parallels between the dérive (unplanned, emotionally driven urban walking), the act of painting, and the algorithmic drift of Machine Learning as it reconstructs images from fragments of data. Within this, I question how memory is reshaped, outsourced, or even fabricated through these emerging systems.

My art is an autobiographical drift through past and present. It is the piecing together of an uncertain cartography of half-remembered and never-happened memories; a non-sequential line of (im)possible moments—now complicated by machine-generated echoes of experiences I never lived but somehow recognize.

My art is therefore, necessarily and unavoidably, a reinvention: a simulacrum of lost times in half-remembered places. It is the re-presentation of an urban drift—human and algorithmic—stretching ahead and behind me, yet always just beyond my grasp.

My work exists somewhere between figuration and abstraction. Drawing remains the bedrock of my practice, but I work across painting, printmaking, animation, filmmaking, and generative processes, allowing traditional and digital methods to intersect and unsettle one another.

Ben Lingard