Gareth Bunting

  'What Silence Brings' is a large scale brush and ink drawing on silk, portraying a dark dystopian landscape which serves as a warning against today's social political and environmental climate. In the forefront is a huge tortured and dying tree, bound in wires and segregated from the rest of the picture by a gigantic grotesque wall, an obvious symbol of humanities detachment from nature. The landscape is dominated by a huge triangular crowd of people, who seem to be existing in their own worlds even within a crowd, looking lost and lonely, narcissistically amusing themselves to death, and entertained by their own Armageddon through the screens in their hands, seemingly unaware of the environmental catastrophe which surrounds them and how it will effect them. This apocalyptic nightmare dramatically depicts a precise moment in time, a massive flash of light illuminating the landscape coming from a mushroom cloud above, sending shock waves through the image and blowing branches from the tree. The melting of the ice caps, huge blocks of ice crumble into the sea and create cataclysmic waves heading for the land, the land which is now doomed behind the walls which they cannot even see behind the mass of plastic waste piled up. Leaning high up is a white flag, representing nationalism or perhaps a submissive cry for help. Barricades are warped into abstract shapes, which represent ideas of borders and barriers being just that, ideas and human-made

'The Fairest Of Them All' is a small ink painting. It was created as a reaction to the absurd and shocking disparity between rich and poor in the UK. My work is always a sort of visual diary which documents current social, political and environmental issues, as well as my own life and experiences. This piece has a small but poignant story behind it. I would walk past several homeless people every day on my way to work in Whitechapel, one day a friendly homeless guy I would occasionally chat too, who lived on the street right outside the tube station, had tragically disappeared never to be seen again. He left a giant mirror in his place, to me it was poignantly reflecting the issues in society in this modern age,  you could see many busy businessmen in suits through the mirror, and the banking district in the background, and the mirror brilliantly put them all in his place momentarily, perhaps allocating blame, or perhaps in a 'like a rolling stone' way, it could've been any of us.. I don't know whether the guy meant to leave the mirror there as a gesture, to make a statement, or if it was just randomly placed there, but I could not help being struck by this mundane but deeply meaningful piece of public art, I had to create art from it.   By 'we are asteroids' artist