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
