Chris Hawtin's work explores the relationship between organic and cybernetic structures, and the effect of technological acceleration on geographic space. Giant floating machines or vessels hover above a more traditional romantic landscape in a fusion of genres, questioning our relationship to the topographic environment in the era of the digital, and how it has been fictionalised in cinematic and virtual space. The titles of the works and the logic of these fictional arenas suggests the presence of a science fiction narrative for the viewer to unravel.

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Working with 3d scans and architectural modelling programmes as well as with the painted surface, Hawtin's work becomes a hybrid of the technological and the organic. The digitally generated structures are a brutal interruption within the paintings yet they are subsumed into the language of the painted surface, playing with the classic genre image of the alien invasion; an invasion both in terms of the fictive scenario in the work and in its literal creation, examining the integrity of the territories of landscape and of painting in the 21st century.

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Born in Ely, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom in 1974 Chris Hawtin has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally.