SKETCHBOOK/ March-May2020:
Specimen Odyssey
Analogue collage, mixed media
Entry into The Collage Clubs Open Call for World Collage Day 9/5/20
See The Collage Club here
Specimen Odyssey, detail
Analogue collage, mixed media
Specimen Odyssey, detail
Analogue collage, mixed media
(Segments from Observers Guide to Geology, Oil Pastel Specimens, Oil Pastel/Photo Print Monolith)
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Monolith
Oil pastel on paper
Monolith, detail
Oil pastel on paper
Sharp manufactured edges for this Monolith
The Monolith is an entry point into an environment of my interpretation, ready to be explored. The form calls back to my wooden structures that acted as portals, enticing people to move through them.
This is an amplified representation of the monolithic forms i have come into contact with and explored through my own work and standing stones at sites including Averybury stone circle and Silbury hill.
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Saddle Oak 1
Digital collage
New formed creatures and specimens
Imagining an alternate experience in Savernake Forest
Specimens
Drawn responses to the new formed creatures that have then been reprocessed in a digital format. These little guys are ready to appear in future collages
Worming
Digital collage
New formed creatures and specimens
Come on in
Digital collage
New formed creatures and specimens
Exploring ideas of discovery formed when you embark through a doorway/arch/portal.
Sampling a Specimen
Digital Collage
Creating new creatures
Compiling sketches to inform a new hoard of specimens that will manifest in other materials
April 2020
Being on lockdown has led to the expansion of my practice through my living space.
I have been creating an exaggerated
environment responding to the natural and man made specimens that I come into contact with.
Bug House
Influence born from encounters during Platform Graduate Exhibition. The act of lifting my ceramic specimens up mirrored the action of lifting up rocks in the garden looking for bugs.
When not exhibited my sculptures live outdoors and have since become home to different hidden insects.
Reading 'John Muir a Miscellany'
Scottish born naturalist, environmental philosopher, honoured as the father of the U.S. National Park system.
"Nature is one, and to me the greatest delight of observation and to study is to discover unities" p.11
"there upon an open plat of yellow moss, near an immense rotten log, were the little plants, so pure" p.15
I was drawn to the way he navigates the reader through his environment to a treasure of a discovery that deeply impacted him. These connections and acts of observing, experiencing and discovery is what i want to interpret and create.
Reading 'Salt in the Wound' by Jurriaan Benschop
Conversations and experiences of Contemporary Artists across Europe.
Anish Kapoor p59-63
Kapoor explores "the notion that an object holds something hidden"
"an object functioning as an entrance to another, immaterial world"
Herman de Vries p.197
"artist is... an ambassador of his... own vision of the world"
Marc Mulder p.174
"the architecture of nature"
Dynamic compositions of organic shapes - not immediately clear what you're looking at
Monoliths, wood, laminated photo print
Additional interactive sculptures that allow the viewer to build and connect the specimens featured in Hoard, 2019. Each tiled with detail of ceramic pieces.
Tension and harmony between forms that reflect nature and industrial precision.