The Art of Collaboration: An Analysis (Seminar)

Over the last year I have been exploring landscape art and investigating the various forms attributed to Landscape Art throughout the history of art. Throughout the Modernist, the Postmodernist and into the Contemporary Art era, landscape art has changed and evolved through continual experimental research grounded in our link and relationship to forming new ways of seeing the world around us. Interventions in the landscape; Abstractions; Shattered Landscapes – developed from the returning soldiers from the First World War; Found objects brought into the gallery space and extractions taken from the post-industrial landscape, explore landscape in new and interesting forms. My particular journey began when I left the U.K. in 2013 for a residency for six months in Cyprus and six months in Spain, being drawn to the dry, eroding, weather worn and Sun scored land of Mediterranean culture.

During my explorations finding new ways of working, away from my previously Media inspired figurative work, I explored extracting information from my walks – using technology to record my pilgrimages via GPS, collecting rocks, soil and photographic images taken from the landscapes I was travelling, evolving my processes of painting and drawing in new ways. These developed further once I returned back to the U.K. in July 2014 and whilst teaching at a PRU for a year. I began to extract soil samples and develop bacteria cultures in Petri dishes. These formed the basis of my Petrus prints and since May 2016 have developed into methods of layering printing ink, forming and exploring through chance, intervention, will, Eco-Feminist and Zen principles – exploring landscape through seeking a synthesis between masculine and feminine co-operations, using nature (application and pressure) and material exploration to form memorial abstractions of the landscape and time.

These will be further explored during my residency at Contains Art in Watchet during September 2016.

Opening day for the Somerset Open Studios and a brilliant day it was too. No sooner the time reached 11am, visitors began to arrive. I did not know what to expect. Lots of people arrived throughout the day, visiting all the studios to see what we have been up to and I was non-stop answering questions, revealing my processes and my three main practices.

Here are three of the six monotypes I have been working on with the latest layers. Six layers in total. I feel these three might be finished – I will put them to one side and reflect.

Over the last couple of months I have been exploring ways of printing and making marks without carving the surface. Through only pressure, gravity and colour I have been producing these print paintings. Through memory of what I have seen on my travels, place to place in the U.K. and abroad, I explore abstract ways of forming printed paintings – bringing to the surface forms I have seen in the landscape or in the towns and villages. Moss, lichen, peeled paint on doors (an obsession of mine), eroded rocks and objects found in the landscape I cycle and walk upon.

Through the accidental and intentional, allowing the Taoist/Daoist principle of ‘living in harmony with, and in accordance to the natural flow or cosmic structural order of the universe’, I am interested in removing intentional placements of colour and marks from the hand of the artist/ brush. Here I allow the tackiness of the material to stick and bind with previous layers, with gravity and pressure placing the ink where it needs to go on the surface.

My role as the artist is in shaping the circle, choosing the colours and placing the paper on top of the printed surface. Through layer upon layer, each layer of ink forms a transference, capturing a moment within the strata of colour, until the image seems to imply it has had enough and needs to dry.

In some ways I am exploring replication of Nature, fractals exploring forms and marks made through chance occurrences and phenomenological elements playing their part in the formation of the final image. These ones are small studies that will inform the process for some larger explorations.

The Sea of Rock series of monotype print-paintings explore the area of West Beach that I walk along during low tide in Watchet. When I am walking along the beach I imagine those days past when Samuel Coleridge, the Father of Romanticism, walked upon this land many years ago. These images borrow a title from the Sea of Ice painting by Caspar Friedrich, a German Romantic painter of the sublime. This rock of West Beach I use as a motif appears, as you look towards Wales, to resonate with Friedrich’s painting.

Through this view and the image I am making draws me into a sublime stream of thinking. Heading into the frontier of the inner space, exploring all those thoughts that wash over my mind, drawn from the depths of my imagination and the snippets of everyday events that appear from the shadows of the mind.

The act of looking across the Bristol channel towards Wales, a country linked to my past, through Great Grandparents and Grandparents, unlocking genetic memory embedded in DNA, triggering past events and resonating to people looking across the channel from Calais towards the tantalizing white cliffs of Dover; from one rock to another.

I think about the current fragmentations in the Middle East and Europe, through religious and political ideologies, fighting and destroying one rock over another. Of historic artefacts lay waste and destroyed, abandoned to the elements, because of what they represent.

My interest in Theology, Ancient Texts, Ecological Feminism, Zen and Metaphysical ideas feed into the work through one way or another. Kinhin techniques bring to light how my thoughts determine the marks I make and how I make them. The layering of time and memory play a dance between human intervention and matter. Ancient times of powdered rock and charcoal pushed, pulled, drawn or spat upon the surface of the cave wall – our instinct always to make and leave a mark or tag. an individual’s testament to existence, a tribal mark and marking one’s territory, one’s rock.

Planets, Ecology, Feminine Principles, Growth, Nurturing and grown bacterial fungi in Petri dishes and the Petrus series link back to St Peter and the travels those pilgrims took to new lands to spread a new way of thinking and understanding the world. All these and more play their tune whilst I play my own, through rock I transform into paint and ink, leaving my mark on this third rock from the Sun.

‘I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church’

Matthew 16:18

Each successive layer of rock pigment furthers the form of the image seen and remembered on West Beach, Watchet.  The artist proof allows the opportunity to play with the forming of the image; the way I work with the printing ink creating the lines and tone, as I press upon the back of the paper.  Through gentle and hard rubbing with fingers and palms, drawing with each finger, I follow an instinctual manipulation of the ink underneath.  Intervention and chance adheres to where I require and where the matter wants to go.  Co-operating between material and pressure.  The nature of the rock working with the movement of my hands and the consistency of the ink.

Together we form a unity.  Artist and Nature working together.  Each layer adding to the dreamlike form that emerges from the mist of rock particles coalescing into a whole