Words on Work

"The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his surrounding universe at the living moment" D.H.Lawrence

My primary concern is to enhance awareness of the nature of being, offering the viewer a lens, a way of looking which refracts a reality concealed from our everyday perceptions. By looking beyond appearance, beyond conditioning, seeing becomes a radical act revealing the timelessness of present and past. Living within a culture, divided from itself, without any need to relate to nature in order to survive, our industrialised economies have in many ways prevented the human condition from making any deep rooted, meaningful relationship with itself.

I work and walk on the coastal fringes along the edge of Scotland. Experiences of places visited or journeys made are expressed through a mixture of materials and methods - text, drawing, painting and assembled found objects which are often made in situ from materials picked up along the way. Working with bone, wood, stone and rust, artefacts appear bearing witness to history; to my own history and to the history of the human condition and its relationship to our environment. The practical and pragmatic relationship that once existed between our culture and its environs inspires me to construct, through the process and completion of these artefacts, a new relationship with the natural world and it offers a window for people to view and reconsider their own relationships to their surroundings. Within the reconstruction and the making of tools and relics lie an understanding of our cultural past, our engagement with the earth and the possibilities that lie therein.

Drawing on the unseen, exploring behind initial appearance the power and energy of nature is revealed in moments of intense clarity where ideas merge with a stone or a shell or the bones of a bird. A drawing creates a space for meditative dialogue. A painting offers a moment of complete reconnection - to childhood; to memory; to a time when awareness of surroundings was more alive, distances less and a universal truth surrendered.