This is a series that I am currently working on and are 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
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Dreaming
Hand mixed acrylic on canvas
2019
​100x150

Tumbling
Hand mixed oil on canvas
2019
​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

We Mean To Float Away
Hand mixed oil on canvas
150x100
2019

Haematite                                                                                                                                                                                                          
Hand mixed oil on canvas                                                                                                                                    
100x100cm                                                                                                                                                                     
2019                                                                                                                                                                                

             

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

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Weir
Hand mixed oil on canvas
200x120
​2019

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