
The Gone Forest

Writing Shadows

Latest Tree Drawings

Somewhere Between Writing and Trees II

Somewhere Between Writing and Trees

Mondrian’s Trees

Trees Triptych No.2

Trees Triptych

A Walk in Shotover Wood

Trees and Other Projects

Two Worlds

Proposing Moments of Pastoral

The Past in Pastoral

The Lawn and the Woods

Silence in the Woods

Silence as Other

The Gesture of Mourning

The First Line?

Proxies

Chinese Landscape Painting

Lamenting Trees

War and The Pastoral Landscape

Goethean Observation: Compost Heap

Absence

Paul Nash Quote

The Keening Landscape

Quotes from ‘Trees’

Trees

A Backdrop to Eternity

Redshift
Scroll Work
I’ve been looking at ways of developing work with scrolls and in particular, how to utilise the background of the scroll to compliment the character (the main focus of the artwork).
It was whilst looking through some old family photographs that I found one of my grandparents, taken at Shotover in 1952. This is the wood where I have been spending time recently, painting the characters for use in the scrolls.

Taking the photograph of my grandparents, I had the idea of using that as the background image, with two of the characters painted in the woods (see image above) positioned on top. The result was, for me, unexpectedly moving.

I’ve always been interested in the idea of the ‘nowness’ of a past event, and how, when we look, for example, at a photograph from the distant past, we can find details that help articulate that sense of now. For me, in the photograph of my grandparents, it’s the shadows at the top of the tree trunk. They point to the space beyond the edges of the photo – the sun, the sky, the canopy of the trees etc. and that sense of ‘now’ is further articulated by the characters painted on top, after all, they are themselves tracings of shadows painted at a particular moment in time.