Narratives, Collected

Even the great oak

Is on fire after the rain.

As are the sunflowers

Hindsight is a Beautiful Thing

A yellow manila envelope. It was always from my grandfather's textiles office in New York, marked with a red Airmail stamp. Par Avion. Printed matter. And in his capitalised handwriting, addressed to my mum. Sometimes a letter; sometimes photos; a newspaper clipping from my grandmother, marked with her scripted thoughts on who would find it of interest. Today, something for my sister and I: A pack of blue paper, too precious to look at in the light. Ten sheets of paper that were to last us, one piece at a time, for a decade: so magical was the formation of an image in front of our eyes using just sunlight and water. We had no idea what made it work. That's the awe of magic: not knowing. Being amazed by the ordinary turned astonishing. The unremarkable becomes wonderful.

In time, the conjuror's trick was revealed. Now, waiting for nightfall in the high summer evenings, when the damaging light seeps through the cracks in the studio blinds until late into the northern dusk; like an alchemist, I mix my own magic: the cyanotype solution. Then to paint with the moss green liquid: Sometimes as the first thoughts, sometimes onto paintings or drawings: revealing sections, colours, marks, thoughts, memories. By day, I take the paintings into the garden; the landscape; to the Spanish mountainsides of rosemary, and lavender scented cliffs; up the sides of Yosemite valley, along the Merced river below; to the great forests of Sequoia; the bluffs of the Pacific coast, the dunes of the Atlantic...

Waiting... watching... blood tingling in my motionless arms... a breeze blows, a cloud passes, chance encounters... thinking... breathing... collecting movements, memories, a portrait of the moment...

... I turn them into photographic paintings: in which light and time are my mediums. Images capturing the tangible moment when the elemental forces of sunlight and the winds of time are frozen into being by the fresh babbling water of a stream; a hotel sink running sharply with snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada mountains; the garden hose water warmed by the midday heat; the salty sea of the Mediterranean. Scratched, and scarred by tumbling pebbles, fine grains of sand and silt, all leaving their mark. Memories of the azure sky, captured. Narratives collected, recorded, and evident as physical happenings, by the very elements of life.

We are the same,

you and I, our ancestors.

We see the same stars.

Ribbons in the Wind

Sparks of a fire kindled in childhood were to smoulder and ignite a passion. The extraordinary emotions felt poring over a book of Andrew Wyeth paintings; of precious peaceful moments reading two volumes of haiku poetry: two books I later breathlessly rediscovered in a university library; poetry taught as handwriting practice in my tiny rural primary school. It was the lyrics of Joni Mitchell, and Paul Simon tumbling from the record player... melancholy magical realism ruminating in the stories of Berger, Marquez, Steinbeck... It was taking my bike and a sketch book out along the wild cliffs and figuring out who was emerging from a chrysalis... It was photography as 35mm and medium format film cameras. It was waiting in excited anticipation to see the images. It was darkrooms, developing, burning, dodging, blinking in the piercing daylight.

The great master photographers, Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier Bresson, Dorathea Lange, Walker Evans, Edward Wesson... all saw, recorded and preserved the moments I held in my hands, caught in the dusty book from my Grandparents basement. I cushion it amongst new Macy's t-shirts, a fish-eye lens bargained for somewhere in the busy streets of Chinatown; and words from my grandfather: subject, composition, timing; his hand gently shaking on my shoulder as he talks, body memory of war and terror. I carried them with my suitcase back home to England.

Wet winter's day in St Ives, Christmas a fresh memory. Monochrome reflections of the cracks in the grey sky upon the slippery cobbled streets. Mum and papa take me to buy a camera lens. My brothers immortalised in the silver particles, echoing the drops of rain. That moment was now. Now, this is then.

I stoked the embers, learned the crafts and applied my art in the physical processes. I engaged with time, captured and froze it; gaining a First class BA Honours Degree in Visual Arts and World History, a Masters Degree in Contemporary Visual Arts, and a gathering of experiences to see my work into international exhibitions and collections. I struggled though, to weave the threads of thought together, in a vacuum of floating warp and weft. The shortcomings of a language that cannot express a feeling it does not collectively feel, became apparent as I tried to understand who I am and what I am expressing in my artwork. Yet one culture had two small words to describe what was intangible, and that one concept, not wholly translatable, because it is an understanding, a feeling, a knowing; is what in Japan is described as Wabi Sabi. So small, so simple, and the connections became visible, and with that, a freedom to weave the tapestry of my oeuvre, no longer floating like disconnected ribbons in the wind.

I feel you slipping,

from my breast, my arm, my hand.

I see you dancing.

Mother. Earth

I am seeing, capturing, reflecting upon, my life, my journey. Resonating ripples of intuition and instinct, of being in touch with a time, a space, a feeling. Motherhood, childhood. Observing the sensual joy and exploration of primary experience; the evolution of the human being; the fledgling flight, too quickly wished away in our modern society. The child on the fluid journey of transition. Hold on! Once we were all children! Run Free!

Mountains, upon which the mothering hands of time have caressed the scars of the birth of Earth; Ancient trees standing sentry at the gates of the past; late evening shadows on the finca wall, clarified by the aperture of the eucalyptus; Silence ringing in opposition to its very essence over expanse of desert; turkey buzzards dancing in the thermals; a pine cone resting in the presence of a fallen ancestor: narrative of connected thoughts: something found, placed, found again, drawn together by an extraordinary object: the seeds of life; the open roads, beckoning, alluding to all that lies along them. Space and perspective provide the contrast to the raw elements shaping the Cornish valley of home.

The only movement

is the sliding of raindrops

off the plum blossom

'Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty in these difficult and ugly days! He is one of the few people left in this distressful world to carry on the tradition of elegance and charm. A useless member of society, considered in terms of economics, he must not be denied his rightful place. He deserves to share it, however humbly, with the painter and poet....'.

Vita Sackville-West

Ashes From The Snow

Home. Roots. The place which feeds my life energy, from the fertile dampness and warmth of mother earth: From which I was born, and to where I shall return. The great absolutes. Revolutions of life. Transient, turbulent seasons running in circles, witnessed in the pleasures and patterns of the garden! The four dimensional canvas, balancing the constant claws of nature with a refined satisfaction of order and design. Oh, the sensual rewards! The uplifting promise of life after a snow storm in late march. Budded almonds bursting forth their pink petals, announcing the end of winter's grip. June roses in rich bloom fed on the ashes from the fires burned in the hearth during cold January nights. A melancholy rustle of late August's leaves underfoot calling autumn from a slumbered memory. Patterns, shapes, texture; the form of a leaf, a bud, petal, branch: the story of time itself, held in the evolutionary records of millenia, stories of circumstance, of struggle and survival.

Time, cycles, patterns. The breaths of the valley, heedless of measured time. October's dawn mist veiling the river as it curves and babbles it way towards the sea: powerful waters of the heaving Atlantic, constantly evolving the sculptural stones and cliffs. The ebbing tide tracing its ripples upon the shore, revealing a pool, a shell, a reflection upon the wet sand. The forewarning flight of crows ahead of the darkening sky. Sumptuous thickness of summer in the meadow grass, punctuated by the swift dip of a swallow; A fleeting shadow of spring against the tree trunk; Corn stalks ragged and softened in form by the late snow. Twisted trees standing in defiant evidence of the restless winds. Evanescent sunlight, brilliantly picking out the ordinary, elevating it's presence. Moments of sublime present.

... It is not the rabbit out of the hat that is extraordinary, but the rabbit out of the rabbit.

John Stewart Collis

Upon Reflection...

I paint, I draw: with mixtures, with photography, with words, with marks; with the raw earth, with the restless oceans, with the breath of a summer's evening, as the shadows creep longer across the lawn...

I work with time, and the immeasurable spaces of experience within... tangible traces, evidence left behind, records; process in action, stilled. I work in the now, and distill it when it has become past.

Hindsight is a beautiful thing. It is only upon reflection that the seemingly insignificant defines itself and becomes symbolic. There is beauty in such poignant breaths. Interconnecting pathways and subtleties of existence become sublime moments of consideration. A pause for contemplation. There is no such thing as an insignificant moment: every pebble of now forms the vast mountain of yesterday, and the great realm of tomorrow's possibilities.