Peter Driver (b. 1962, Littleport, UK) has an MA in Fine Art from Winchester School of Art, where he now teaches on the Fine Art degree programme. He is a multidisciplinary artist, addressing his concerns for people and planet through a process of social actions grounded in the analogue and the hand-made. Whether presenting his psychogeographic experiences of durational walks and contested sites, negotiating the ambiguities of text and interpretation, or exploring the personal poetic territory of his paintings, he confronts viewers with work that can be both a material assertion and a tentative search for understanding.

His abstract paintings are drawn from the deep well of bereavement and lived experience. Often commemorating his late daughter’s excitement about colour, they begin with found traces and uncontrolled gestures onto which he imposes passages of order and decision-making to create a rich, seductive and complex surface, reflecting emotional intensity.
His woodcuts might set a short text within a context combining colour-play, geometric sequence and the natural forms found within the grain of his woodblocks.

Driver operates in the tradition of the Fool and Mischief-Maker, seeking the transformative in the apparently futile and trite. There is a sense of gift and generosity in the work; that even in his most personal work he is journeying and working for others, for ‘us’. When the text is a surreptitious punch on the nose, it is delivered with love. The work comes from a love of wild places and of humanity coupled with a tendency to dissent. His commitment to reaching non-exclusive audiences might find him in the street, handing out free woodcut prints to passers-by, or seeking public venues for his projects, such as K6 Gallery in two decommissioned phone-boxes.

As a curator and collaborator, Driver achieves his objectives by making opportunities for others, particularly for young and emerging artists.