This is aseries is in a sense a response to the work that I have been doing over the last two years, a reflection, they have all been created within a period of flow, they contain the impetus to provide space to fall into and reflect and remember during these very turbulent times. I have used the pigments researched during the last two years. Each research project was based on historical events which had resonance with the now, so for example how did the story of privateering play out within the history of pigments? What about peaceful trade and periods of conflict? Which pigments have been used over all time by all people? What is the relationship between the cost of pigments and how their use plays out in religion? Where is the impact of the industrial revolution? The pigments chosen are rich in meaning, the ochres which have geographic and historic universal humanity. Indigo has been embroiled in the story of human trade culture, tracing the silk route, Colonialism, slavery and the Industrial Revolution, and chemical manufactures. Ultramarine a pigment once prized as an expensive import across the silk routes, imported across the lands of the Middle East and across the Mediterranean, in the same seas which witness the desperation of the flight of refugees from war, the same seas mentioned in the Illyad as a lost place, used in medieval and later paintings of the virgin, which later became a cheaper manufacture. Cobalt Blue is a complex pigment, at once the pigment that represents for me the beauty of cross cultural exchange in the form of ceramics and glasses that are evidence of this across time and spread across the world, and at the same time the mineral is inside our computerised devices in the batteries, powering them, and it is a pigment that is unstable and toxic, an echo of the debates circulating around migration and refugees by the far right in our current climate. And then the carbon blacks, bone black and vine black which are as old as ochres and rich in resonance produced with fire and the basic products of the land, and increasingly investigated as a way of recycling the dirt produced by engines.
The Falcon Cannot Hear The Falconer Melting,
Hand mixed oil on canvas Hand mixed acrylic on canvas
2019 2019
100x150 100x150
Hand mixed oil on canvas Hand mixed acrylic on canvas
2019 2019
100x150 100x150
Way Out (of decisions Made in the Dark) When We Were So Busy Getting Lost
Hand mixed acrylic on canvas Hand Mixed Oil on Canvas
100x150 cm 100x150cm
2019 2019
Hand mixed acrylic on canvas Hand Mixed Oil on Canvas
100x150 cm 100x150cm
2019 2019
We Mean To Float Away
Hand mixed oil on canvas
150x100
2019
Hand mixed oil on canvas
150x100
2019
Haematite
Hand mixed oil on canvas
100x100cm
2019
Hand mixed oil on canvas
100x100cm
2019

Are We Nearly There Yet?
Hand Mixed Oil on canvas
100x100cm 2019

Weir
Hand mixed oil on canvas
200x120
2019
Hand mixed oil on canvas
200x120
2019
Weir Triptych
Hand mixed oil on wood with copper sheathed edges
150x50 in total
2019
Hand mixed oil on wood with copper sheathed edges
150x50 in total
2019