This week I got the delightful news that I will be having a show in a small public gallery in Lincolnshire in 2019. I will be producing a body of work directly related to place and lost memories. This is the county where I was born, however my family moved away when I was very small. The landscapes and colours of Lincolnshire are the first that I saw, and the family stories that have been told by my parents are part of who I am, and yet how much are they my own memories? And how much has the area transformed in the intervening years? This is my starting point for this project, and I am feeling excited. Phase one is going to be a photographic expedition over the Easter break.
In the mean time I have been playing around with images from landscapes of my later childhood, places I do remember, the New Forest, Martin Down, places local to my later childhood home: drawing, photographing, developing abstractions and playing with creating evocative spaces.
As these works reflect on geographic place then the abstractions have a basis in real landscapes, refined to the point of suggestion. This is a development in my work, started with Fulham Lethe, prior to that the abstractions were from memories of place or a direct interpretation of pure idea. I am interested in where the interplay between idea, story and geographic place will take me. The London work has been embedded in an idea of place as a trading centre, and a place that is in almost constant flux, the form constantly changing. It is lovely to set off on a new adventure, a rural contrast and it will be interesting to challenge that idea of rural constancy.
Having scaled up my work in the 2016-7 period I will need to scale down again, as the gallery has a limited number of large walls, I will be receiving the gallery plans soon.
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