Markus Draper’s More than a Story presents a selection of his images going back to the eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington state in US on 18 May, 1980.
Draper began to develop a fascination with photos and videos of this natural disaster in 2007. In the same year he focused for the first time on the volcano’s peculiar ash cloud formations, a motif that would become a recurrent subject that still informs his paintings today. It is important for Draper that his pictures cannot be 'located', stating that ”My paintings do not seek to depict a concrete event – rather, they express a general feeling of insecurity, acting as a kind of diagnosis of society: there is a sense of unease, of vague fear and malaise that cannot be related to any specific causes. They also express a kind of criticism. It may be more comfortable for people to persevere in a state of fear than attempt to change the situation they are in.“
Spector Books, 44pp, 24cm x 32cm, paperback, 2021