GALLERY

A Summary of Visual Works. 

My painting and mark-making are a self-evident reflection of that which materialises from my written work 

This arbitrary staining of the canvas, this painting, or what remains of it, a thing or no-thing, is no more than the visible scripture of matter – a gathering of material substance. Infant, orphan, wild and untameable, the work is born and thriving on the ruptured surfaces of the paper, in the tensions between fractured pigments and natural detritus – these unworked elements combine and elide, as if readying the canvas for a ceremony. One by one, each as singular and unique as the first, as accomplices, as mute memorials, these wild markings are always the sum of what precedes them – as ways to open to the Next Place;  pieces that are not altogether connected by any universal law. This is not art for the sake of art- it is an exercise of mine, an intimate thing that helps me understand the nature of things, and the things of nature – a method by which I learn to understand myself in a strange kind of dream or reverie. Mark-making as a small but intimate ritual,  absorbing the discarded remnants of the land.  

These works appear to form themselves, arriving from nothing, they are the most intuitive, gestural and physical aspect of my creativity.  They arrive with a spontaneity of colour stains –  throughout the process of creating them, the commitment and work practice were more based on an ancient labour, conducted in almost monastical silence – a concentrated reflection on the fluidity of options and moments –  in counterpoint to the written works from The Land Incanted, in which the processual velocity is evident, the physical dedication to the material is made manifest in gestural images that are alive and substantial, guided by turbulent storms over the oceans, by disquiet geologies, by the false maps of hidden lands, by the unnamed winds.

The Land Incanted – as the name itself might imply –  is an arrival in an alternate territory, and the visual work exposes and reveals an inner place – timeless and eternal – devoid of the human presence. 

 It is a quest not just for the minimum,  but for the most essential.  The layers of the visual medium start to slowly form the nuances, shades and transparencies of a particular state of mind,  an intangible, barely habitable place. I do not wish to visualise the velocity, turbulence and noise of the world; my ambition and challenge was to stop time, build the silence, create a more tranquil place for a kind of rebirth. And in this suspended state of timeless free will, we begin once more; we are winged creatures flying over the oceans, into the mountains, to places beyond perception; in them we come again to new lands, lost and forgotten places, planting memories and mirages, sowing poetry.