ARTIST
STEPHEN WADCOCK
“In an age of acceleration and artifice, my work seeks not a return to nature but an encounter with its fractured double — landscapes remembered, refracted, and recalibrated through memory and loss. The sublime no longer resides in grandeur, but in slowness, attrition, and the delicate dissolution of certainty.”
ABOUT
Working across printmaking, mark-making, photography, and installation, I engage in gradual processes of fading and transformation. Imperfect tools and fugitive materials are central to my practice, favoring gestures and surfaces that resist permanence. Breath-led drawings, ink absorbed into saltwater, and slow accumulations form a living archive of becoming and disappearance.
Against the backdrop of synthetic time and performative authenticity, I pursue a quiet resistance. Memory, for me, is sediment; identity, weathered ground. My work offers no narrative — only mythologies of fracture and recalibration. Figures are implied, landscapes absent, inviting viewers into a meditation on impermanence and longing.
Through ritual, distortion, and quiet myth-making, I seek to build a body of work that stands lightly but endures — lasting forever, and then, simply, is over.
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The Meditations Collection is a series of radial gradient digital prints conceived as quiet studies in perception and presence. Each work functions as both meditation and calibration, inviting sustained looking and subtle attunement. The gradients emerge from a process of layering and modulation, registering shifts in light, memory, and emotional resonance.
Rooted in solitary encounters with landscape and the unseen rhythms of daily experience, these prints translate fleeting impressions into distilled forms. Their surfaces hold a sense of time, with soft transitions, gentle erasures, and gradual expansions that reflect the slow unfolding of attention.
Rather than striving for resolution, the Meditations are intended as open-ended spaces. They offer viewers a chance to pause, to recalibrate their senses, and to consider how simplicity can hold complexity. In their restraint, these works create a contemplative field where perception becomes both an inquiry and an act of quiet renewal.
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The Abstracted Landscapes series explores the space between representation and memory through digitally manipulated photographic prints. Each image begins with a direct encounter in the landscape, then evolves through layers of transformation that shift it toward something more open and uncertain.
These works are not literal records but interpretations that question how place can be felt rather than simply seen. Subtle distortions, softened contours, and adjustments in scale invite viewers to experience the familiar as if for the first time. The process becomes a way to explore how perception changes over time, influenced by emotion, recollection, and imagination.
In their quiet complexity, these landscapes suggest that clarity is often elusive. They hold moments of recognition and ambiguity side by side, encouraging a slower kind of looking. The series offers a contemplative space where the boundary between observation and memory dissolves into something fluid, shifting, and alive.
