Mark H Lawrence

Changing Ideas Award
'This painting forms part of a wider series confronting the human rights consequences of modern warfare, with a focus on the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and Gaza. It engages directly with issues of social injustice by examining how armed conflict disproportionately impacts non-combatants, and how such harm is repeatedly normalised within global political systems.

Centred on a bombed residential building in Kyiv, the work isolates a site of civilian devastation that might otherwise be reduced to soulless statistics or ‘consumed’ through news imagery. In doing so, it reflects on the role of journalism and visual documentation in shaping public understanding, while questioning the limits of visibility when accountability for such destruction in modern society is virtually absent and our global systems become frayed.

The aerial perspective draws on the visual language of drone surveillance and remote warfare, highlighting a growing detachment between decision-making, consequence and voyeurism. This distance raises urgent ethical questions around responsibility, international law, and the protection of civilian life — issues at the core of ongoing human rights advocacy and legal scrutiny delineated through political belief rather than the rule of law.

By focusing on a single destroyed residential building, the painting resists abstraction and instead brings into stark focus the lived reality of displacement, loss, and long-term social devastation. It asks the viewer to consider whose lives are protected, whose are then vulnerable, and how these inequalities are sustained.

Through this, the work aligns with broader efforts by journalists, campaigners, and legal advocates to document the unending harm, to challenge exemption from accountability, and to support the push for systemic change in the protection of human rights during conflict.