ANKARIS is an independent science-fiction world created through painting, design and story.

I have created it because I wanted to recover a feeling I have always looked for in images: that sense of wonder and mystery.

The feeling of standing before an enormous structure and not quite understanding it. Of looking towards a distant horizon and wondering what lies beyond it. Of arriving somewhere with a history that began long before you and will continue long after you leave.

Scale is central to Ankaris.

Tiny figures stand beneath machines the size of landscapes. Ships become cities. Wreckage becomes geography. Horizons stretch beyond the frame.

Even when I am working in a sketchbook only a few inches across, I am looking for that same sense of immensity. The image should feel larger than the thing containing it.

That becomes even more important when the paintings are seen physically.

I have watched people encounter the larger Ankaris paintings at exhibitions and respond very differently from the way they do to the same image on a screen.

I want you to feel like you’re entering the world, not merely looking at a painting.

I want you to stand at the edge of something vast, unfamiliar and only partly understood. Close enough to feel the human scale of the people within it, but surrounded by the world that extends beyond the frame.

A screen can show you the image.

At physical scale, I want you to feel the space.

The world itself exists among the skeletal remains of colossal star-faring vessels whose original purpose has long since faded into myth.

These ships were not wrecks. They were brought here. Decommissioned vessels that once carried sentient intelligences were dismantled over generations in something resembling a ritual sky burial on a planetary scale.

Their immense bodies became part of the landscape.

Stories persist of ancient intelligences that once moved within these vessels like souls inhabiting vast mechanical bodies.

But I am less interested in explaining every part of Ankaris than in leaving enough unanswered.

The paintings provide evidence rather than complete explanations.

ANKARIS has been developing through paintings, drawings and fragments of story for more than twenty years.

It is a world shaped by scale, atmosphere, memory and mystery. By the remains of things too large to be fully understood and by the people who continue to live among them.

I don’t want Ankaris to explain itself completely.

I want there to be room for wonder.

ANKARIS
The Past Archaeology of a Forgotten Future

Fragment recovered from an uncatalogued monastery archive:

“Somewhere beneath the oldest carriers, something is still dreaming.”

— fragment 7A-19: heavily degraded