The work I selected to present for my final presentation was grouped under one title, Tea Garden with a series number. The title begins to develop once the work is started. I search for a word that divides into two, which then opens it up to other readings, as in the previous titles I have used, New Land and Rose Land. This title references the jazz trombone player Jack Teagarden, who I have listened to exclusively whilst making the work. The two words Tea Garden hint at other places and times, another form of movement perhaps.There was a Jack Teagarden album in my childhood home, an early sound memory.
My use of colour is guided by wanting to secure a chord or hum. My work is not about landscape or pattern making neither is it a comment on contemporary urban life. Rather it is about giving visual voice to a practice of seeing, moving and being; the point at which kinaesthetic senses are actively connected to the visual senses and inner experience. Physical and emotional elements have been drawn together into the work and now exist as a witness to place, person and purpose.
The memory of surface and edge connects the work to place and touch, vinyl, melamine, linoleum. Books covered with plastic and cloth. Foil and cellophane sweet wrappers. The surfaces and contents of the homes of my grandparents. These elements contribute to an opening up of ‘hard to place’ time period, not nostalgia, but a now of then; a double reading, as with listening to live recordings of music, a double listening.
