Downland Portfolio – Downland Impressions
The work is deliberately impressionistic with areas of sharp clarity printed on a fine art paper surface. It uses a new visual language technique to convey the subtle sense of a landscape in flux. It shows the paradox of exploitation and the evolving beauty of slow-time intervention in the Downland. It’s a landscape that has been marked for centuries by people for resource, reshaped by the forest clearance of Neolithic settlers to its present form by agro-industry that has worked the thin top soil, which veneers the chalk, to near exhaustion.
All these studies are within a six mile radius of where I live.
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Downland Portfolio – Downland Gloaming
Night walks over the old chalk paths and byways of the Downs, along with the work of the artist Eric Ravilious and the poetry of Edward Thomas are the main inspirations behind my series of photographs, Downland Gloaming.
I have been walking at night in the Downs for more than twenty years, so when I started this project I was familiar with this landscape and that moment when the light starts to fade from the surfaces.
The gloaming for me is that time, that liminal space, when we leave the clarity of the day and enter the light of the imagination. These photographs are equivalents, moments experienced and subtle recordings in a fading landscape and they therefore require time for the eye to adjust to slowly reveal the visual traces, lines, and patterns of the landscape of ancient and modern times.
Downland Gloaming was first exhibited at the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne 2019
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Survival – 30 Trees
While on an Eastern European journey in 2018, I came across an ash-smothered tree, on a site of human extinction. Three years later, in Paris, a number of trees sparked the memory of that single tree.
Survival – 30 Trees embody the thoughts and feelings of seeing that ash-smothered tree.
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Arbor Mysterium
Walking in woods at night the imagination is heightened to a degree where space and objects can be transformed; walking through a wood at night is a sublime experience that reveals the beauty within the darkness.
This monochromatic work was created in the woods of East Sussex.
Work from Arbor Mysterium was shown in the exhibition Arboretum curated by John Stezaker and Lucy Bell at the The Lucy Bell Gallery in 2019
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