Extraction zone 2026 – 30 x 24cm, acrylic on canvas
For the first time in a series spanning thirteen years, the flowers are all but gone.
In the upper right corner of Extraction Zone, a small dense fragment of impasto, blue, green, red, built up and chromatic, clings to the edge of the canvas. It is based on aerial views of Dutch tulip fields: that hyper-organised, colour-blocked, maximally productive agricultural surface in which nature has been rationalised into pure geometric output. From above, the tulip field is beautiful in the way that land use diagrams are beautiful, total, legible, administered. It occupies its corner of this painting not as survivor or as hope but as the other version of the same logic that governs everything else in the frame: land subjected to complete productive control, a different and more photogenic form of extraction.
Everything else is ground.
The entire surface of the canvas is stratigraphy, not paint describing earth but paint performing the logic of extraction directly. Diagonal bands of grey-blue, sand, darker deposit move from upper left to lower right at the angle of sedimentary geology, a quarry face or a cliff section or an aerial view of a site after the water table has reasserted itself following industrial abandonment. The central ridge of heavily worked impasto, elongated, raised, running the length of the canvas like an exposed seam or a wound, is the painting’s spine.
This is not representation. The canvas does not depict an extraction site. It is one, materially, built up, worked over, its surface bearing the physical record of the process that produced it.
The hard edge where the tulip field corner meets the geological surface is the painting’s most concentrated political statement. It is a planning boundary, a zone perimeter, the line on the map that means one side operates under one legal regime while the other side bears the consequences.
In the network of freeports and special economic zones Powell’s research has traced across Britain and beyond, this edge is the decisive document: clean on paper, catastrophic in its material effects on the brownfield and greenfield sites it consumes, on the neighbouring villages and towns that find themselves suddenly adjacent to infrastructure operating outside normal regulatory frameworks, on the public finances that underwrite private extraction at obscene scale. The proximity of the zone to the world outside it, that border where the tulip field meets the scar, is where the disaster is produced.
Within the flower series, Extraction Zone represents the terminus of a formal progression that has been building across the 2026 works. In Implacable Cries, the geological substrate appeared as a separate panel below the canvas. In Morning is at Hand, it occupied the lower register. In Like in that Old Light, it consumed the right edge. Here it has taken the entire surface. The buried ground, present in the earlier paintings as subtext and substrate, has risen to fill the frame completely. What the flowers were always standing in front of is now all there is.
The fragment in the corner, the aerial garden, the free zone’s photogenic neighbour, is the only colour left. Whether it is being expelled from the canvas or has not yet been reached by what is moving across it from the left is impossible to determine. That ambiguity is, at this point in the series, the most honest position the painting can take.