Contemporary Landscape Artists
Da Nang, Vietnam, 2025
About
Sandy and Peter Steel are British artists based between the UK, Hong Kong and Vietnam, that have been collaborating on creative projects around the world for over 40 years.
This section gives some information on their background, working methodology, and how it all started on a hitch-hiking road trip from the UK to Greece when they were art students, back in 1984.
Their lens-mediated creative work focuses particularly on the development of constructed photographic images that explore and document time-based alternative perspectives of their experiences within environments of natural landscapes and man-made cityscapes.
In the Fragmented City Views section you can see some of their work made during this ongoing project, between 2013 and 2025.
In the Field Views section you can view work made between 2020 and 2024 influenced by the countryside of the UK, and more recently Vietnam.
The Latest Work - 2025 link provides a carousel of recent images from their ‘Fragmented City Views’ project, which focusses on developing alternative cityscape perspectives.
Biography
Sandy and Peter (b.1960 in Birkenhead, UK and 1958 in Bradford, UK) have been creative collaborators for over 40 years: first meeting at Harrogate College of Art in 1981, and later both studying at Ravensbourne College of Art in London, UK (1982-85), on the sculpture and painting/printmaking (Fine Art) degree courses respectively.
They moved to Amsterdam in The Netherlands in 1988 to work for pioneering software development companies in the early days of the computer graphics industry, which were providing innovative production technology to major film special effects studios around the world, including US based Academy Award winning ‘Digital Domain’, and the George Lucas founded ‘Industrial Light and Magic’ (ILM).
They married in Amsterdam in 1992 and relocated to Hong Kong later that year to further develop their creative practice and be close to a network of private collectors in Asia Pacific - particularly from the digital technology, film, entertainment and banking industries - that had begun to take an early interest in their lens-based landscape informed constructed digital images.
Between 1993 and 2007 they established a number of digital media oriented ventures in the APAC region, including Computer Images China magazine in Hong Kong and Beijing, the first of its type in Chinese, focused on innovations in VR, AR, computer graphics, non-linear editing, digital compositing and similar. It was during this period they began experimenting with using motion capture and 3D software tools in combination with photographic devices as a means to visually document and record - through abstracted data traces - the activity and process of drawing within technologically defined and limited physical spaces.
In 2007 they moved from Hong Kong to New Delhi, India with their son and daughter, where Peter worked with leading broadcast company NDTV. They continued to develop their work across the country using lens-based devices to capture experiences within natural and built landscapes, moving to the UK in 2010. After short periods with film VFX production companies in Los Angeles, Florida, Abu Dhabi and Beijing, they returned to India in 2015 until 2017, basing themselves in the Juhu area of Mumbai and working on a number of private and commissioned creative projects that involved travelling around the city in auto rickshaws and visually documenting their journeys.
Although the creative work of Sandy and Peter has been acquired by private collectors for over 35 years - particularly in Asia Pacific countries like China, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and India - they only started to consider the possibility of showing to a wider public audience as a consequence of Covid lockdowns internationally and the resulting impact and effect on global travel. During this period they began to focus more on their UK based practice, which resulted in the time-based ‘Field Views’ series they have been developing since 2020, as part of their on-going ‘Landscapes in Motion’ project.
They are currently focused on developing their extensive ‘Fragmented City Views’ series of monochromatic constructed photographic images, that they first began in Hong Kong in 2013.
Sandy and Peter divide their time between the UK, Hong Kong and Vietnam/SE Asia.
Artists Statement
We first started collaborating together while students at Ravensbourne College of Art in London, in 1984, documenting a 6-week circuitous hitch-hiking journey from the UK to Greece.
We managed to get the support of the college, or more specifically the late painter Vic Kuell - then a senior lecturer in the Fine Art Department at Ravensbourne and long time member of The London Group of artists - to agree to subsidise our trip through a grant to purchase a significant number of rolls of black & white film.
However, the kind and enthuisiastic support of Vic came with the condition that throughout our journey we took time to pause, reflect and document evidence of where we were, not just through acknowledging the differences and similarities of the evolving landscape around us, but by looking beyond what we could directly see to find the spaces ‘in-between’, and to also look down and examine the minutiae and inter-relationships of the ‘imagery’ visible where we were standing; “search for the gold beneath your feet”, is the phrase Vic used then, and it has stayed with us to this day.
During that trip we were arrested by the police in Niš - then a city in Yugoslavia but now part of Serbia as a result of shifting geo-political borders - as potential enemies of the state, after being reported by a member of the public for photographing in an [unmarked] apparently restricted area near a train station.
After the phone intervention of the British Embassy over a 100 miles away in Belgrade, the situation was eventually recognised as a misunderstanding, and we were released after several hours of detention, minus a few rolls of exposed film.
Not long after, while attempting to record and recall details of that event as part of our project - and with Vic’s voice still fresh in our heads - our attention was drawn to the notion and concept of defined location in actual and (re)imagined place; of concrete, intangible and invisible boundaries; in the veracity, unreliability, ephemeral and transient nature of memory and re-lived experience. These foundational issues have since remained an overarching constant in the evolution of our practice.
Our ongoing ‘Fragmented City Views’, project is concerned with visual deconstruction and reinvention: by exploring the reimagining of geographically distributed cityscape topographies as experienced by physically travelling through them, and reinventing aspects of them as abstracted but interrelated 2 dimensional constructs and images.
This involves our trying to locate those hidden liminal spaces that exist just out of direct sight, possibly within defined or barely perceptible boundaries, on the periphery, often at the edges and borders of streets, lanes and alley ways, and passages between buildings in cities. Using digital photography and video we document, capture and examine aspects of our engagement, experience and non-destructive interaction with these built environments; without agenda, without provocation or expectation.
We later disassemble the evidence of these visual records, deconstructing the linear sequence of movement and events as they occurred; combining their disparate elements with those acquired in other cities, enabling us to reconsider, reimagine, reassemble, reconstruct and codify new visual experiences and alternative narratives and perspectives.
We are currently experimenting by combining 2 or more completed Fragmented City View images together in diptych, triptych and multiple component pieces. This process of continual reinvention enables us to further create abstracted tracings, images that in contradiction exist simultaneously as new, and paradoxically as obfuscated versions of those from which they originate.
In and through our work we hope to locate and reveal discreet ‘city' scape informed images that occur and fleetingly exist in plain sight, occupying points of tension that appear suspended beside and between layered fragments and states of isolated time, that we consider a form of digital fossilisation.
We collectively describe the work within our ongoing and constantly evolving creative project as ‘Landscapes in Motion’ and it has taken us around the world for over 40 years.
The video still above shows us near the village of Achiltbuie in Ross and Cromarty on the North West Coast of Scotland in July 2020, discussing the potential of a natural formation of dried wood to be included in future work. In the distance it’s possible to see across to the privately owned island of Tanera Mor in the Summer Isles.