2019

The Cleeve Common project incorporates several different sets of work made around the same area of land, a Common peice of grazing land on the edge of the Coteswold ridge outside Cheltenham, an historic site of ancient settlements, post industrial quarry, airfield and now site of radio transmitters. The project cmprises of a set of etchings that take a contemporary approach to landscape and attempt to evoke the sense of rediscovering its lost layers of history and lore. The prints are fragmented through stencilling and multiple layers that suggest something transitory, similar to what I feel when recalling – but not being able to clearly see – places in my mind.

A place holds many meanings metaphorically, symbolically, environmentally and historically but over time it’s as though we have lost something, we no longer know the land that we rely on or the significances that it carries. This is a rediscovery of place in our modern situation, a re-establishing of our relation to it as we are confronted by it as a distanced familiar.

In experiencing these places through their topography and entity it is almost like entering visual conversations with them and developing a knowing through interaction. It is the remembered perceptions of a place that stay with us to become obscured through repeated recollection and are most important to me as they allow the sense of uncanny, which I have felt whilst walking these landscapes, to appear as surreal distortions, and fragments of what is seen, felt and understood.

Printmaking, in particular etching, is integral to this as not only do I feel that etching has such a power to capture these nuances of both human and natural landscape, but the time its layers impose allow me to re-experience a place, I can be back with it, and so the prints emotive elements evolve as I work. The final artefacts capture the significance of place and my time within it, the work becomes a portrait of a landscape, this experience, and how I have begun to know it.

The final project including ‘The Cloud Form suite’, ‘Vantage point’ and the ‘Liminality Series’ were shown as part of Percepts 2019, at the University of Gloucestershire.

The Liminality Tryptich and the Cloud Form Suite was also shown at the Hardwick Gallery, Cheltenham as part of a collaborative graduate residency in 2019.