New Beginnings - November 2023
“Notice what you notice”. Over the last year, everything about my art-making has re-set. It has shifted from large-scale calm vistas of imagined landscapes to a slower more considered and contemplative mood and scale. I recently completed a year-long ‘Defining Practice’ Programme at Newlyn School Art. It was an emotional journey, giving me the space and time to explore what wasn’t working in my art alongside the aspects that seemed to resonate positively. My visual language has been stretched through the focus on "notice what you notice” and exploring different starting points. Printmaking was completely new to me and was something that enabled me to break out of old instinctive habits with paint, into new and surprising results. I’d always thought that print was about having control; I discovered how spontaneous, expressive and uncontrolled print can be. Peeling back the paper gives that thrill of what will be revealed.
Newlyn gave me a way into reviewing my approach to abstraction and composition in an intense two-day immersive practice session in early June. I left Penzance at 5pm on Friday night, with the course content, and overwhelming emotions surging in me; my head was overflowing and buzzing. Within 24 hours, my partner and I had travelled over 800 miles, by train and car, to Mallaig in the north west of Scotland and the next day on to the island of Canna where we had been invited to join a friend on holiday.
It had been a long-held ambition to head to Torridon, in the far North West of Scotland, so after a week on Canna, we headed further North to Torridon. It is a remote and dramatic landscape where the sea loch rests between rugged peaks. The Highland Clearances in the 1700s and 1900s led to the forced movement of local people from crofting on the hillside down to the loch side, resulting in the loss of their livelihoods. In order to survive they collectively built a ‘fish trap’ at the head of the loch. Constructed from stone it is a demonstration of fragility, resourcefulness and the precarious balance of existence.
What emerged for me was a period of reflection about the challenges of building new ways of working. The stone in the landscape represented solidity; something on which to build self-confidence in my changing artistic expression. Out of this, I had a period of about two months in which I explored monotype without a press, but finally decided that to achieve the depth of colour I wanted, acquiring a press was the best way forward. By August, I had set up my Hawthorn Press and begun a period of rapid learning, with many many mistakes. I honed my skills and produced a series of monotypes, each one unique. I took a selection of my results to my final session in Newlyn and felt affirmed by tutors and fellow students in my changed artistic expression.
Each of the prints was developed in multiple stages exploring compositions. Since September I have continued to develop monotypes with a delicate balance of strength and stillness to arrive at a point when I felt a mindful moment.