Andrew Backhouse

Andrew Backhouse makes work about memory and absence. He works from an idea that keeps returning: the past never fully disappears, and even events that never happened still shape the present.

Rather than tell a straightforward story, Andrew builds from fragments: sound, image and text that resist a single reading. He treats found and recorded material not as a record of what happened, but as raw material to reshape, layer and reposition. The result avoids a clear or literal reading. Instead it creates the sense of a half-remembered event: images blurred by sunlight, ideas that sit closer to a distant recollection than a precise account.

Digitally reworking historical and contemporary imagery into layered, fragmented compositions, Andrew mixes archival material from different eras with a newly edited layer, pointing to how futures that never arrived still press on the present. The work asks viewers to see memory and history as overlapping and unreliable, shaped as much by what never happened as by what did.

Time, in Andrew's work, is not a straight line. It loops, echoes and interrupts itself, carrying the imprint of the past into the present in ways that are hard to pin down. His fragmented, layered approach is where these ideas live, rather than something he states outright.

For Andrew, making art means exploring, editing and staying open to uncertainty. He lets the past interrupt the present, and asks viewers to notice what sits at the edge of sight: overlooked, unresolved, and still there.