PRINT RESIDENCY
CARDIFF M.A.D.E
Each starting with a poem that had resonance to our practices, we used these as a hook on which to hang our initial thoughts and ideas. I had a small limestone pebble which became a kind of Talisman, midway on its journey to new form; and which seemed to encapsulate the deeper concepts of time and landscape I was trying to express visually.
Initial experiments were based around discovering what marks were possible and this was very freeing, allowing the mark to be the narrative whilst testing the parameters of the materials, finding new pathways by the process of attrition; picking up new knowing on the way. In an attempt to move away from the literal, I started to cut up the collagraph plates. This process of disassembling and reassembling felt intimidating yet intuitive and in retrospect represents the larger ideas of landscape I've been seeking to explore.
The images became more about formal relationship, pattern, form and colour; observed and remembered.
'From the close by sprigs of heather to the most distant fold of the land, each detail stands erect in its own validity. Details are no longer a grouping and a picture of which I am the focal point. The focal point is everywhere. Nothing has reference to me-the looker. This is how the earth must see itself.'
Nan Shepherd. The Living Mountain.