Wild Places and Other Feelings 2022

Curiously, we occasionally feel we already know a new place, or that it knows us. An impassive landscape becomes the channel for our intuition. I wonder if this intimate relationship exists because our evolution is interwoven with being attuned to the horizon, to the way clouds form as air collides with a mountain, with the angle of the sun as it catches the light-seeking cabbage tree in the deepest part of a valley. Increasingly, we snatch these connections through a moving car window or steal a glimpse of a beloved place by scrolling through photos on our mobile phones. Access to untamed places is becoming constrained.

Returning to pastels, a medium that I last used thirty years ago, I have relished their immediacy and grappled with their fragility. These clunky sticks of pigment have an intrinsic innocence, perhaps because of the limitations of mark and colour palette.  My heart was set on working with the constraints of the medium. The more I whittled the work down to an instant that would have passed only seconds later as the light changed, the closer I got to a universal feeling. Our experiences of landscape are intimations of both our significance and our insignificance - an idea that is increasingly percolating to the surface of our consciousness.

WIld Places and Other Feelings at Gallery 2, October 2022