In industrial nineteenth century England, confectionary maker Joseph Cadbury began using countryside scenes to sell new mass market chocolates. The company’s anodyne versions of the rural became so ubiquitous that the expression ‘chocolate box painting’ still refers to a whole genre of sentimentally bucolic imagery today.

With The Chocolate Box Paintings, McNab revisited this history by modelling new landscapes out of the single-use plastic trays used for contemporary confectionary. The packaging becomes mountains and valleys in unnervingly desolate and chemically coloured scenes. Theorist Benjamin Greenman wrote of these paintings as lying 'between an airless landscape and an architecture of ruins.’ Landscapes that are entirely made of single-use plastics have become more visible in the years since these paintings were made, as has resistance to the way mass tourism packages place.

“In the ‘chocolate box’ landscapes, the designs of the plastic, reiterating natural motifs, are echoed in the desolate structures of the picture. The open shell forms are like vessels of light, with an intricate and ambiguous folding of surfaces. A humanized nature returns as an unnerving and inhuman space, something between an airless landscape and an architecture of ruins. In the age of the spectacle commodity McNab’s work resonates with a pathos that bears the trace of a humanized but unreconciled ‘nature’.”