For the past 30 years my work has investigated cities and architecture seeking out the overlooked, lost, forgotten and misplaced. Working predominantly in painting, photography, and now sculpture, works and projects have explored the transitory and contradictory nature of landscape.

In the latest series of paintings, tiny sculptural forms and constructions are used as the starting point for the investigation of a painterly space between art, architecture and landscape. Referring back to the ideals and intentions of Constructivist painters and forward to oncoming climate collapse, the resulting small works are intended to suggest monumental forms, teetering, tipping and out of balance. Situated within a bare, illusory landscape often suggesting activity just out of sight, the works aim to “activate” the viewer, awakening a consciousness of emergency. Whilst it is also understood this objective is in vain, there remains a sense of hope.

“She makes us look at things we previously have been half-blind to. She reveals the hidden make-up and fabric of significant corners of our environment. She invents new techniques to embody unexplored subjects. She makes us recognise the laws of natural force in the most dramatic of manufactured structures. She makes us see from unprecedented perspectives. She presents images that are so skillfully freed of dogma, or message mongering, or art historical cliché, or easily interpretable illustrated meaning, that they let the viewer’s senses experience the painting’s presence and allow the viewer’s thoughts and imagination to wander away as they will. Finally, Benz enables us to see an unpredictable beauty in what might have been shallowly misconstrued by those with less creative insight as the downright pits of ugliness”
Robert Clark, 2006
(Artist, Writer for The Guardian newspaper and Senior Lecturer, University of Derby)