“Urban Jungle” was made at Hole Editions in Newcastle where I worked in collaboration with master-printer Lee Turner. It’s a development of one of my wood engravings of Tudor-era chimneys, of which I had made studies when I was artist-in-residence at Eton College in 2016. This particular composition was created in Photoshop using repeated elements of my chimney engravings rescaled, regrouped and multiplied many times to create a sense of a vast forest of chimneys, which begin to resemble some kind of man-made trees. I had in mind, when creating this image, Mervyn Peake’s wildly eccentric multi-turreted Castle Gormenghast from his Gormenghast fantasy series of Gothic novels (begun in 1946). I was also thinking about human-generated global warming and deforestation. There is intended irony and double meaning in the work’s title. The meaning of the phrase “urban jungle” is understood to describe an urban area filled with buildings and regarded as especially unwelcoming or dangerous, though “jungle” itself is defined as an area of land overgrown with dense forest and tangled vegetation. I hope that the image in the context of its title suggests both a wild urban sprawl and also a sense of pollution associated with lost forests.