I started my blog by looking at some of the artists that I admire, noting how they represent the sublime and the sense of place and time in their work. What I want to do in my work is research landscape – what is it to make a landscape and how can it engender a sense of place, time, the sublime even?
I want to explore the sublime – that sense of ‘other’ and what that means today as the concrete jungle increasingly gobbles up resources and changes the environment forever.
These are some paintings I made in response to some visits to Orford Ness and its AWRE site. Meaningless Wreckage is inspired by rusty, hectic shapes of wreckage at the AWRE site. But really it is about nothing – structures from the past making a strange, increasingly meaningless landscape.
W. G. Seabald, in his book The Rings of Saturn, described Orford Ness as giving him the feeling of being “amidst the remains of our own civilisation after its extinction in some future catastrophe” (p. 237). I wanted to capture that atmosphere in Wasteland. I feel that the canvas is too large and that I have not achieved what I wanted. I am, however, fascinated by the humanesque shape of a piece of wire that I photographed in the shingle and used in my painting.
I will return to Orford Ness in the Spring to continue my work there.
