About
Landscape, in Stephen Wadcock’s practice, is less a place than a structure of thought and feeling. Physical ground, metaphor and psychological state occupy the same field. The horizon or threshold is where this field concentrates: a line that reflects back not a view, but the weather of the person looking at it, and yet remains stubbornly indifferent. For Wadcock, a quiet sense of hiraeth underlies this relation to landscape, a form of distance and almost-return that informs the work without dictating how it should be read.
He builds situations in which that line can be met. Horizons and thresholds drawn from forest edges, sea edges, shorelines and mountainous ridges are reconfigured as conditions rather than scenes. The emphasis lies on how attention behaves in their presence, on what happens when exterior distance and inner state are held in the same frame, without a single meaning being proposed.
Materiality, environment and perception form the operative core. Surfaces are treated as records of contact: staining, rusting, eroding, printing and exposure register time spent with weather, light and duration. Materials are given specific parameters, then allowed to follow their own tendencies, so that significance arises through trace, relation and change rather than through overt symbol.
What matters is not the faithful depiction of a place, but the experience of standing in relation to it. The work offers a horizon or a threshold and holds that space steadily; the viewer arrives with their own history and completes the encounter through the way they look, hesitate, turn away or stay.
Bio
Stephen Wadcock (b. 1979) is a Welsh-born, London-based artist whose work explores landscape as both external terrain and interior state. Working across painting, photography, printmaking, light, sculpture, drawing and installation, he constructs situations where horizons and thresholds act as testing grounds for how perception settles, drifts or refuses to resolve.
Fieldwork in North Wales and other demanding rural environments, alongside walks at the edges of cities, is central to his method. Photographs, written notes, gathered fragments and simple tests of light and distance made on site return to the studio as material and experiential residue. These are distilled into prints, structures and spatial arrangements that hold conditions open rather than steer a particular response.
Personal history informs the work quietly. Early breaks in memory and identity fostered a comfort with uncertainty and a preference for restraint over display. This underpins an ethic of authentic intent and care for how others meet the work on their own terms.
He is currently undertaking an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins (2025–2027).
Education
MA Fine Art, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, 2025–2027
Exhibitions
Filthy Lucre Greening: The Exhibition, City Lit Gallery, London, 2025
Archway Open Studios, Central Saint Martins, London, 2025
Brixton Department Store, London, 2025
Residencies / Fieldwork
Snowdonia residency, Corris, Winter 2025
Somerset Levels, Wick Farm residency, Summer 2025
SUPERWRX
SUPERWRX is an artist-led platform founded by Stephen Wadcock, growing at the intersection of individual practice and a wider, evolving network. It focuses on experimental work, cultural analysis and small-scale public projects that sit slightly aside from mainstream institutional pathways.
The platform is developing toward a hybrid form: part publishing and dispatch engine, part prototype for a future gallery and support structure. Its long-term aim is to become a community-focused organisation capable of sustaining artists who work with threshold experiences, perception and forms of practice that are not easily captured by existing systems.
SUPERWRX privileges intent, clarity and refusal of spectacle. It values practices that create conditions for genuine encounter, rather than simply supplying content, and it pays attention to how artists can remain sovereign while still working in relation to institutions and publics.
Although initiated by Wadcock, SUPERWRX is conceived as a shared site. Future dispatches, events and collaborations will invite contributions from other artists, researchers and local communities who align with its ethos of experimental, slow and critically engaged practice.