Flower in the Wind-notations of memory

I choose to create images which bring forth the integrity of experience and the honesty of self.

We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensation of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places- retreated to most often when we are most remote from them- are among the most important landscapes we possess. [1] Robert McFarlane

These recent works pays homage to their origins; drawing from an eclectic set of gardens carrying meaningful connections to personal history which hint at metaphorical relationships toward simplicity, strength, resilience, fragility and renewal.

The diverse locations from which these memories are traced are landscapes saturated in light and space, often connected to gardens of childhood and the fluid coastal environs of adult life. My rural childhood home with its beautiful garden was deleted by fire not long after leaving with my parents in the mid 1960s. In the years that followed the land lay vacant, the footprint dissolved, while some trees remained as sentinels. Gardens since then have been a constant providing a space for nurture, familiarity and renewal, whether they be my own or those visited. A residency in the 1990’s in the Hamptons, New York but more recently, Monet’s garden in Giverny, and frequently visited as part of a Cite des Arts residency triggered both memory and a renewed interest which continues to provide extension of these important ideas.

‘…I am interested in capturing the simplicity of structure and rhythms of such places; reducing the experience to raw mark suggestive of both the psychological and geographical essence of site; the works becoming spaces of intimacy, familiarity and nurture’.

While colour and gesture may allude to a range of vegetation and location each work possesses an independent identity. No one work fixes a singular site or time but instead explores a collective layering of responses and associations keeping interpretation open and fluid.