Rocks Into Pebbles- December 2023
This autumn I have been developing my monotypes and, what started in my mind as rocks, have morphed into pebbles. My initial thinking came from my impressions of the rocks in The Fish Trap in Torridon. We are six months on 600 miles away, and it is out of sight and not visible now, so I gave myself artistic license to play with the ideas. Because I'd felt such a deep affinity with the landscape in NW Scotland, I decided to search my family tree. I knew that Grace, my great-great grandmother was from Perthshire, but I wanted to see if I could trace family origins to the west of Scotland; I couldn’t. Records of births and deaths seemed to stop in the late 18th Century. What I could see, though, was the fragility of my family’s existence in the 1850’s. I learnt that my great great great grandfather (Grace’s father) had been a cotton weaver- a skilled occupation: but as the rise of weaving in factories led to the decline in the cottage industry (remember the Luddites?), he appears to have lost his trade and the family unit broke up, with him ten years later, working as an agricultural worker on an estate, with his wife at another address in domestic service and, Grace, (then a child) living with her grandfather, a gardener in another estate. Ten years on, Grace, my great great grandmother, was living in Yorkshire close to where my mother was born. We don’t know the reasons for her move but can only guess that she moved for work, probably domestic service.
This story of fragility of existence, and the threads that connect us, resonates even today. What causes most people to move from one area to another is work and safety.
Some days, as I worked on my monotypes, I found the shapes and compositions represented something solid and stable, but on other days, they felt like arrangements carefully balanced. Sometimes, I would look at them and see shapes arranged like members of a group: some quietly in the background and others jostling for attention. As I worked on the monotypes, each one was created through multiple layers of ink, passing through the press several times. Many prints were almost finished and, with one clumsy move, an effect might be lost, but then with others surprisingly beautiful results emerged like the dappled white on some stones.
How did the rocks become pebbles? Rocks conjure up the sense of something jagged; pebbles have been buffeted and smoothed off by attrition, or life. These monotypes are 15 cm square and, like pebbles, will just about fit into the palm of your hand. I hope that the feeling these monotypes convey is of balance and solidity, without being heavy. A frequent challenge for artists is knowing when it is finished. I know my prints are there when I feel an inner calm; in a way, a moment of mindfulness. I can feel it in my body; there is a peace and relaxation. I am unapologetic about the simplicity of some of the prints. It is the power of silence.