EXHIBITIONS
This exhibition began when I was sitting amongst long grasses, by standing stones. I had spent a lot of time with my dog Orla in mutual appreciation of the sights, sounds and scents around us in this special place.
Having said a sad but inevitable goodbye to her a few weeks
before, the moment provoked specific memories but also seemed to conjure
other, human bereavements reaching back generations, and deepened my
reflections on the subject of loss and the preciousness of life.
When I took these drawings, which had almost drawn themselves, back to my studio, I found that many seemed to sit together as part of a bigger whole whilst retaining their individual resonance. There was a relaxed tension between them and I liked the contradiction.
How to describe this ‘Between’ which I found in front of me? Images of above and below ground, life and death, asleep and awake, dark and light, being at a threshold, positive and negative (shapes and mood)…were all there for me to see.
In the studio I worked on paper and also on wood, piecing sections of drawings together and working into them. I used recycled pieces of wood as I found them, leaving them at the size they were, only sanding the surface, then painting and sitting them together, drawing over their boundaries and stopping at others.
What emerged was an intuitive, unpredictable, only partly conscious process that, on reflection, seemed to mirror something of the complexity of our dark and light times.
RECENT
Society of Scottish Artists
ROYAL SCOTTISH ACADEMY, EDINBURGH
17 DEC 2022 - 10 JAN 2023
AWARDS
J&W Gordon Smith Trust prize (Nesting 3)
The Purcell Paper prize (Nesting 5)
Nesting
SOLO SHOW
UPRIGHT GALLERY, EDINBURGH
18 JUNE - 8 JULY 2022
This exhibition gathered together work made during a period of unexpected nesting during the pandemic. Through close observation of found feathers and nests, I slowed down and settled in to make studies of these beautiful, complex and perfectly imperfect structures.
With pieces developed through drawing, painting, monoprinting and collage, Nesting features works on paper, wood and in textiles.
