Ghost Structure: Memory, Rewilding, and a Bat Den

Ghost Structure began as a painting, but like most of my work in The New, it sits between the real and the constructed. The site is real: an overgrown patch of land near tillington west sussex, where the remains of a scaffolded shelter were slowly being reclaimed by the land.

What used to be a makeshift hut human-built, temporary has now been converted into a bat roost. No longer a shelter for people, but for another kind of survivor. The structure didn’t collapse. It shifted purpose. Adapted.

That moment stuck with me.

The painting sits with that tension: two figures burning in a space that isn’t theirs anymore, watched over by the ghost of architecture. It’s not nostalgia. It’s post-function. A space that refuses to be erased but doesn’t beg to be remembered either.

This is part of The New Futurist Manifesto: no skyscrapers, no techno-utopias, no speed for speed’s sake. Just transformation. Collapse into habitat. Structure as memory.

Painted in gouache on archival paper, mounted and signed. Fully made in the UK (minus the paper-still looking for a local mill).

Images of the site and process below.