Bowdidge’s images function as a touchstone between the artist and his audience. The experience is ambivalent and contains within itself not one but many interpretations. What he creates feels like architectural space, film or stage sets or the multiple universes described by astrophysicists.

Some images evoke the idea of Big Brother surveillance and the post-apocalyptic nightmares of science fiction writer Philip K Dick, familiar through films like Blade Runner and Matrix. Sci-fi illustrators Chris Foss and Jim Burns have influenced the artist.

The capacity of Bowdidge’s recent digital art works to reflect back a range of sensations and ideas arises from the artistic manipulation of the original image. An image is moved and altered through a sequence of “filters” which are part of the software.

These allow the modulation of a given image by fading, squashing and squeezing it, or flipping it around. All the changes are incorporated and present within the surface of the result. The original photograph is not lost but is still there with its original colour gradations and its natural palette.