Instagram story viewer> @srgbennett> Posts
Stephen RG Bennett(@srgbennett)'s profile avatar HD Profile

Stephen RG Bennett

@srgbennett

742
followers
690
following
Visual artist working across landscape and governance. Co-Head, UK Policy Lab.
POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED
Valley, 2024–26 Los Angeles. I have family there, and a visit in 2022 stayed with me. I took the unorthodox approach: checked my hire car in, and spent days walking and riding the subway across the city. The heat, the impossibility of getting anywhere as a pedestrian, the smell of flowers and experiencing the vast road infrastructure at street level. Then by satellite, the San Fernando Valley becomes something quite different: an incredibly precise grid. These paintings explore the tension between those perspectives. I build up thin washes of acrylic on paper, allowing pigment to pool, separate, desiccate and stain. Between layers, I laser engrave the roads and subdivisions of the valley into the painted surface. The mapped geometries appear, disappear and re-emerge, caught between imposed order and the unpredictable behaviour of the materials. The full series is now on my website. Link in bio. Images: Valley X (2026), Valley VIII (2025), Valley X (detail), Valley IX (2025), Valley II (2024). by @srgbennett
2
2 days ago
Download
A studio visit with Tatiana Kochubinskaya, an extraordinary Ukrainian curator currently on a @britishcouncil fellowship in residence at @delfinafdn I first met Tatiana at Delfina’s recent open house, where she showed artwork alongside her curatorial research. I loved that intermingling of art, curation, convening and production, something I recognise in my own work, and in lineages such as the Artist Placement Group and @eprjcts. In the studio, we spoke about landscape, memory, scarring and governance. Tatiana has recently been working with the idea of guilty landscapes, a phrase that carries profound weight in relation to eastern Ukraine, where much of her current research is situated. It also resonated deeply with my own interest in the marks left on land by power, extraction, infrastructure and policy. We spoke about art, policy and government, including my work bringing artists into policy. What might these relations mean across different geographies, from Ukraine to the US to the UK? And how do they shift under different political conditions, including wartime, institutional instability and changing forms of government? Tatiana’s experience brings a whole new light to my work in this field. I was especially moved by Tatiana’s work with @antiwarcoalition.art and @zkmkarlsruhe on the Sense of Safety publication. As always in a studio visit, the conversation found its own unexpected object: a set of delicate cyanotype climate change maps printed on glass, which I produced back in 2017. The process partly failed. The data washed out. The information became barely visible. And somehow, that made them more powerful. Thank you @kochunia33 for visiting the studio in Walthamstow. by @srgbennett
0
a month ago
Download
A visit to @lukemwalker_artist studio in Battersea. Luke is one of the founders of the @wildernessartcollective, a group I’ve been part of, and exhibited with, for many years. His work has always resonated with me: landscape understood not only as image, but as something encountered through the body, through walking, drifting, recording and returning. We spoke about data, boundaries, memory and movement, and the different ways a landscape can be translated without being flattened. I was especially drawn to Luke’s newer works: minimal, almost diagrammatic paintings that hold walking data as traces, rhythms and forms. A reminder that landscape is never just “out there”. It is measured, walked, felt, remembered, and made again. by @srgbennett
3
2 months ago
Download
Destruction Layer Fry: “…he translated it and discovered it was not a language of grand warriors, not of magnificent heroes, not of poetry… it was a boring language of tax records and bureaucracy…” Dalrymple: “The civil servants are there as well.” Anand: “It’s Inland Revenue vs poetry.” This is from an episode of Empire, where Stephen Fry, Anita Anand and William Dalrymple discussed the decipherment of Linear B, the script of Mycenaean Greece. Many of these records survived because clay tablets were accidentally fired hard in the blazes that destroyed palaces and archives. I have been thinking about this destruction layer: the trace left after a system has changed, collapsed or moved on. It connects back to an artwork I made a few years ago. Who Saw The Deep was a series of nine ceramic tablets buried around London, carrying environmental data and asking what a future civilisation might make of what we leave behind. Some tablets are still just visible. Others have already vanished. Perhaps into the soil. Perhaps tossed into the River Lea. Perhaps sitting on someone’s mantelpiece, entirely detached from the system of meaning that produced them. Looking back, I can see this work was about the material life of information. What decisions and evidence do we choose to record? What technologies do we trust to hold that record? Full piece in my monthly studio newsletter. Link in bio. by @srgbennett
1
2 months ago
Download
So good to be back in the studio! A set of experiments trying to free up my hand and be less literal in my work. Fragments of satellite imagery, infrastructure, policy text, cultivation, extraction and landscape, and marks that haven’t quite settled yet. Sketches on tracing paper. Not sure where this might go but enjoying the process. by @srgbennett
1
3 months ago
Download
Surface History, 2025-ongoing I’ve brought together this developing body of work on my website. The works begin with satellite images of multilayered landscapes, where infrastructure, extraction, settlement and cultivation meet - and often strain against - geologies formed over millennia. Printed onto vinyl film, the images are manipulated with sprays and floods of water. As I try to direct the wet pigment, it pools, drains, separates, desiccates and fissures elsewhere. The apparently authoritative satellite view breaks down, and I introduce another, unstable geography of my own. This tension between control and contingency becomes a material echo of the existential drama and bodily vulnerability of life on a changing planet. The resulting works are unexpected terrains in which governance, science, love and terror become entangled. The full project is now live on my website, link in bio. Images: Pivot State; Soft Catastrophe; Take the Lowest Position; Body Storm; The Way is the Dust of the Way; Surface History. by @srgbennett
0
3 months ago
Download
Sanding back the surface, something appeared from underneath. As the painted and engraved layers disappeared, strange scratches and manufacturing patterns emerged from within the plywood: industrial scars embedded deep in the laminated structure of the material. Marks that had always been present, but invisible until abrasion brought them to the surface. A palimpsest, literally. A surface written on, scraped back, and written on again - where the scraping reveals the earlier text rather than erasing it. The piece is Lines in the Earth. The original engraving depicted agricultural landscapes around @joya_air in southern Spain: aerial views marked by the geometry of irrigation and land management over centuries. Traces accumulating on top of traces. More in my recent newsletter. Link in bio. by @srgbennett
0
4 months ago
Download
In 1878, the City of London took over Epping Forest and prohibited pollarding - the centuries-old practice of repeatedly cutting branches to produce timber poles for those living and working in the forest. These beech trees are what happened next. They continued growing from the forms they had already been forced into - trunks rising thickly before bursting outward into enormous tentacular shapes several metres above the ground, like giant upturned squids. A sculptural record of legislation. The visible afterlife of governance, embedded in living material. More in my recent newsletter, alongside notes on a plywood piece I’ve been sanding back in the studio. Link in bio. With thanks to @thestreettree and @christie.wip by @srgbennett
1
4 months ago
Download
A view from Under the Same Sky at Paintspace Galleries, London. One of the pleasures of group exhibitions is seeing works enter into conversation with one another. Here, my work sits alongside works by Laura Melissa Williams and Jyoti Bharwani. Different practices, different materials, but shared interests in landscape, memory, material transformation and traces left behind over time. Thank you to everyone who visited last weekend and spent time with the exhibition. Under the Same Sky, a Wilderness Art Collective exhibition, is open for one final weekend: 13–14 June. @jyotibharwani_artist @lauramelissawilliams @paintspaces_studio @wildernessartcollective #hampstead #londonartscene by @srgbennett
3
4 months ago
Download
Artist Spotlight Stephen R.G Bennett @srgbennett Valley VIII (2025) Acrylic and laser engraving on paper 39 x 29 cm (unframed), 53 x 43 cm (framed) | £450 Valley I (2025) Acrylic and laser engraving on paper 29 x 21 cm (unframed), 44 x 31 cm (framed) | £325 Stephen R. G. Bennett’s work explores the ways power, infrastructure and human decision-making shape both landscapes and lived experience. Combining satellite imagery, water, pigment and laser engraving, these works transform images of North American terrain into fractured, shifting surfaces where chance, gravity and intervention leave their mark. In Valley I and Valley VIII, engraved lines echo infrastructure cut into the land, while disrupted imagery reveals the tensions between natural systems and human control. Together, the works suggest that although we all live beneath the same sky, the ground beneath us carries very different histories, pressures and futures. Bennett’s practice spans painting, water-distorted printing and laser engraving, creating landscapes that sit between geology, data and human intervention. His work has been exhibited at Tate Exchange, the Royal Geographical Society and the Andrew Brownsword Gallery, and developed through collaborations with organisations including CERN, the Royal Society and Nesta. For sales enquiries, please contact the gallery. 📍 Paint Spaces Gallery, 167 Broadhurst Gardens, London NW6 3AU 🕚 Open 13th 14th June 11-4pm #UnderTheSameSky #LondonGalleryWeekend #PaintSpacesGallery #WestHampstead #wildernessartcollective taken in NW6 (West Hampstead) by @srgbennett
0
4 months ago
Download
Landscape is often treated as scenery. I’m more interested in it as a surface of inscription. I’ll be showing two laser-engraved works on painted surfaces as part of Under the Same Sky at @paintspaces_gallery, London. Developed from satellite imagery of North American landscapes, the engraved lines sit somewhere between cartography, infrastructure, scientific diagram and digital system. They cut through the painted surface, interrupting the image’s documentary authority. 6–14 June 2026 Meet the Artists: Saturday 6 June, 11am–4pm With @wildernessartcollective by @srgbennett
3
5 months ago
Download
Way back at Central Saint Martins, I was given a simple exercise: Pick three fragments at random - a material, a method, a subject - and make something from their combination. Glass. Sculpting. Sports equipment. Interviewing. The brain. This work - made from bacterial cultures - came out of that exercise. At the time, it felt arbitrary. Now I see it differently. The idea of “forced connections” has stayed with me - not just in making images, but in how work happens beyond the studio - in policy spaces. Over time, I’ve come to think of this in three ways: • Art as matter: the terrain of concern. This is cultural policy, or ‘policy for art’ • Art as methodology: artistic practices that change how institutions think and operate, from the Artist Placement Group through to MANIFEST. This is ‘art for policy’. • Art as mindset: a way of working shaped by artistic training: assembling fragments, holding tensions, allowing different elements to remain in relation without forcing resolution. These strands are not separate. They overlap and inform one another. What began as a visual practice - collage - has become a way of working across art, science and policy: in the margins, in the overlays, and in the spaces where systems meet. — More in the latest edition of my newsletter Link in bio by @srgbennett
4
5 months ago
Download

Download All

Save the photos and videos currently loaded on this page.

0Photos
0Videos
Ready to download 0 / 0

Keep this tab open until your download is ready.
back to up