Urban Abstractions began with a small frustration: most pictures of Bristol show you what you already know. The same harbour, the same bridge, the same postcard. We wanted to make work that showed the city as design — the shapes and colours hiding inside the familiar view.
Not photography, exactly
Every piece starts with a photograph, but the photograph is only raw material. What matters is what happens next: a building is broken into planes, water into bands of colour, a crane into a few decisive lines. The result sits somewhere between photograph and painting — closer to how you remember a place than to how a lens records it.
We’re not interested in the souvenir version of Bristol. No gloss, no clutter, no tourist-guide gold lettering. The work is meant to be premium, modern and architectural — the kind of thing that earns a wall in a flat in Clifton or a meeting room in the centre, and still looks considered ten years later.
Line, plane, colour
Three things do most of the work. Line, where a roofline or a mast becomes a single confident stroke. Plane, where a brick façade flattens into interlocking shapes. Colour, pushed past what the camera saw, until the candy houses above the Floating Harbour read as pure blocks of pink, teal and ochre.
Strip a view back this far and something odd happens: you recognise it more, not less. The Grain Barge below the Hotwells terraces is unmistakable even when the whole hillside has dissolved into facets. Abstraction doesn’t hide the city. It points at it.
Why Bristol first
Because it’s a city that rewards this kind of looking. The harbour is a working machine of cranes, ferries and liveaboards; the architecture runs from Byzantine warehouses to timber-framed corners; the green edges press right up to the water. Bristol Reimagined is the first collection, and the start of a longer series — other cities will follow, each seen the same way.
Every print is produced as a limited edition on matt archival paper, signed and numbered. That’s the other half of the philosophy: the work should be made properly, and there should only ever be so many of each.
A city you know by heart, drawn as shapes you’ve never quite noticed.