Andrew's research interests focus on exploring our complex engagement with place. He makes site-responsive artworks that explore the relationship between people and place with particular attention paid to traces of cultural memory. He is interested in the habit and signatures of place and how they are encoded within material forms of the commonplace. He is also interested in the allegorical and poetic potential of investigating the intersection between contemporary and classical art.
As well as producing work for exhibition, Andrew presents papers and publishes articles on place-making, site-responsive and situational practices, including serendipity and improvisation. In, The Slender Margin Between the Real and the Unreal, he was co-author with Professor Kiyoshi Okutsu (Yamaguchi University, Japan) and Gavin Morrison (Atopia Projects, Europe) that explored the connection between the stroll gardens of the Tokugawa and Meji periods of Japan and the European pleasure gardens from the same period.
He is co-director with Dr Becky Shaw and Penny McCarthy (Sheffield Hallam University) on an interdisciplinary project called Gravity, (www.gravity21.org) that was launched in 2011 to provide a forum for critical debate surrounding visual art practices. Through a themed programme of invited speakers this research project examines the myriad ways the art world deals with its ambivalent and yet enduring relationship with the materiality surrounding the object. This project is currently in receipt of Arts Council funding.