When I arrived, you’d already left by Rhett Martny
This series unfolds from a kind of constructed longing — a fantasy tethered to the real, but always at a remove. It begins not with my own steps through a landscape, but with images: documentation of hikes undertaken by strangers, uploaded, tagged, filtered, shared. These glimpses — scenic outlooks, blurred motion, ecstatic summits — summon a yearning for immersion in something beyond the urban churn. A nostalgia not for a specific place, but for an experience never had.
The works are thrice removed. Once: I was never there. Twice: the event is mediated through another’s lens — their framing, their gesture. Thrice: the drawing, my drawing, reinterprets that image, translating it through the slow labour of mark-making. What emerges is not a record of presence, but a residue of absence. The hike is not depicted — it is inferred, imagined, abstracted.
This is not a series about hiking. It is about the distance between experience and representation. About how we borrow the lives of others in search of meaning. About the quiet melancholy that settles when we realise the sublime has become scrollable — consumed, flattened, dislocated. These drawings are artefacts of that dislocation, shaped by longing and lack. They are neither maps nor memories, but something else entirely: a trace of a desire to be elsewhere.
This show runs from 1st - 25th May 2025.
×
When I arrived, you’d already left by Rhett Martny
This series unfolds from a kind of constructed longing — a fantasy tethered to the real, but always at a remove. It begins not with my own steps through a landscape, but with images: documentation of hikes undertaken by strangers, uploaded, tagged, filtered, shared. These glimpses — scenic outlooks, blurred motion, ecstatic summits — summon a yearning for immersion in something beyond the urban churn. A nostalgia not for a specific place, but for an experience never had.
The works are thrice removed. Once: I was never there. Twice: the event is mediated through another’s lens — their framing, their gesture. Thrice: the drawing, my drawing, reinterprets that image, translating it through the slow labour of mark-making. What emerges is not a record of presence, but a residue of absence. The hike is not depicted — it is inferred, imagined, abstracted.
This is not a series about hiking. It is about the distance between experience and representation. About how we borrow the lives of others in search of meaning. About the quiet melancholy that settles when we realise the sublime has become scrollable — consumed, flattened, dislocated. These drawings are artefacts of that dislocation, shaped by longing and lack. They are neither maps nor memories, but something else entirely: a trace of a desire to be elsewhere.
