Britain’s motorway infrastructure serves as subject matter for artist Jen Orpin’s monograph

The Modernist Society takes a detour from its usual publishing habits with a new monograph, The Architecture of Connection, featuring the work of painter Jen Orpin. We’re in the realm of unseen and overlooked infrastructure, with Orpin’s eye – and careful framing – capturing over 200 images of the bridges that span Britain’s motorways.

The choice of subject is certainly up the street of The Modernist’s usual patrons, not least because British motorway architecture is a very cohesive collection of post-war, proto-brutal and strictly functional structures. But Orpin has other motivations. Prior to embarking on the series, she had taken regularly journeys to visit her late father.

‘My dad passed away in December 2015 after three months in intensive care,’ she explains. ‘During that time, I travelled weekly between Manchester and Surrey. I became so familiar with each stretch of road and junction; with the bridges I passed under becoming landmarks. The journeys gave me time for reflection and became spaces where memory, grief, and nostalgia intertwined.’

This perspective gives a fresh layer of meaning to these structures; after all, who hasn’t marked a journey or a familiar route with landmarks such as these? These bridges might be seen as an unlikely subject for a landscape painter, but following her loss, the project consumed Orpin’s practice for eight years.

‘I was drawn to these liminal, overlooked places and concrete structures as both physical and symbolic forms: connecting places, people, and moments in time. They have become metaphors for transition, loss, and connection,’ Orpin says.

The Architecture of Connection brings the entire series together in a monograph for the first time, together with some of the artist’s writings about the work. The primary routes she took were the M1 and M6 motorways, along which one will find some of the most distinctive examples of motorway architecture.

The book was designed by the legendary Malcolm Garrett, renowned for his graphic design work across the British music industry. ‘Here was an unashamed celebration of a contemporary architecture often decried or ignored, yet rapidly becoming a timeless representation of the modern age,’ Garrett says. ‘Like Jen, I admired the elegance not hitherto associated with such functional structures. These images, both painterly and photographic, were of transient moments made effortlessly permanent through what they chose to include or exclude.’

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Aficionados of motorway infrastructure – and there are plenty out there – will recognise many of these landmarks, including the Pennine Tower above Forton Services in Lancashire, the M6 bridge that (still) bears the logo of 80s band The Pies, or the Chalfont Viaduct, an Edwardian structure above the M25 that’s also a familiar graffiti site.

‘Jen’s paintings have a stillness and precision, echoed in Malcolm's design which gives them exactly the space they deserve,’ says Jack Hale, who co-founded The Modernist Society with Eddy Rhead and Maureen Ward in 2008. ‘it was a genuine pleasure to work with Jen and Malcolm on this book.’

The Architecture of Connection, Jen Orpin, £45. The first 100 orders will also receive a free limited-edition print produced by Klein Editions, The-Modernist.org, @TheModernist, JenOrpinPaintings.com, @JenOrpinPainter