In contrast to water’s quick mutability, yet aligned to its drip-by-drip persistence, my drawing process is a slow and meditative practice, a patient accretion of simple marks and translucent, layered washes that results in intricate forms resembling sea foam, cloud formations or wave patterns. Complex patterns emerge from an iterative process akin to the self-generating growth of natural structures. The water-based paint I use is as liquid as my subject: it drips, splashes, flows, evaporates and spills in unpredictable ways. I often use reflective and iridescent media such as mica, metal leaf and chrome ink to create surfaces that change, as water does, with each shift of light, in a visual play between surface and depth that responds to the viewer’s movements.
Mark-making takes the brief moment of the hand’s movement and holds it still, recorded in the mark that remains. The slow, repetitive drawing method I employ makes each painting a receptacle of time, a net that gathers up these moments so they are visible in a single instant that shows the timespan of the artwork’s own making.
My work invites a recalibration towards slowness, stillness and attentiveness, proposing these as a means to connect us more deeply to our own awareness and our place, and to sensitise us to the water-borne web of kinship and interdependency that supports us. As any islander knows, water is not just how we are separated, but also how we are connected.
This then, is the paradoxical aspiration of a practice that is quiet, repetitive, often solitary, that bears the hallmarks of an introvert nature, and that responds to an island location many would consider ‘remote’: to connect.
