I am interested in joining the Arborealists as it seems a fitting group to join my interests with.
My work is about the landscape, particularly the agricultural landscape around where I live and in which I am immersed. This is not a romantic response although paradoxically there is beauty to be found in unexpected places. I feel I can contribute to the group because not many artists are saying anything about what is happening on the farmed landscape today.
I walk and draw on the land daily, drawing seems the first step to understanding the territory. The work then moves into painting and printmaking in the studio. Pictorial structure and the edge of the
image offer exciting scope to explore the space and scale in a landscape of huge fields and scattered trees. Colour is used in a way that is not realistic but is intended to evoke a parallel to the atmosphere of the subject and to recreate the intensity of a visual experience. Space within the image is manipulated away from the literal to imply distance, height and mass. Things placed on the edge of the image indicate possible sidelining, disappearance, fragmentation. Large areas of one colour imply bareness, aridity, erosion.
At the moment I am involved in surveying hedges for farmers with The Great Big Dorset Hedge group. Many of these hedges have trees within them.
The work is intended to be a document as well as an expression