Harris, December 2007
Awards
Inverarity One to One Travel Award
RGI annual exhibition 2007
The Armour Award
RGI annual exhibition 2006
The William Bowie Award
PAI annual exhibition 2006
The Langside College Watercolour Award
RGI annual exhibition 2005
Contemporary Fine Art Gallery (Eton) Award
PAI annual exhibition 2005
The Glasgow Art Club Fellowship
RGI annual exhibition 2000
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It has always been a central philosophy to my work to search beyond representation. Therefore, my approach is intuitive rather than analytical - there is deliberate tension between areas of abstraction and finer detail. Most works are a distillation of collected experiences into a visual unity and an evocation, rather than depiction of place.
I work with acrylic paint of varying consistencies, creating a "lived-in" surface where thicker paint is often scratched into and overlaid with inkier washes. I find this technique most fitting for expressing how everyday objects and settings are marked by the passing of time and by human existence.
Still Life
My still life work has often included found objects from forays to beaches and old ruins in the Hebrides. Recently feathers have begun to appear more and more in the paintings and a lot of the work has taken on a theme of exploring friendships. The metaphor of likening friends to feathers has offered many pointers for new work; every feather is unique, some are shed, others re-grown in their place. So there is transience. Bearing this in mind, I now include many personal artefacts in the still life, including keepsakes and old letters (a lot of my friendships in life were formed before the days of mobile phones, text and email).
The organic nature of my research and working process has taken me on a journey, reflecting on romantic times when people wrote to one another with quill pens and sealed their letters with wax. I have tried to bring this charm to the work, while adding a contemporary edge.
Figurative
My figurative work has largely been borne out of the exploration of friendship in the still life work. Whether real or imaginery, my characters have to have a strong sense of the individual.
I have continued to develop my figurative pieces along with a body of work I created as a result of a recent trip to France; During my visit to Champagne and my research there, I happened to find beautiful cemeteries, several at the very edge of some of the vineyards and the others scattered across the cities of Reims and Paris.
The cemeteries were filled with small private chapels - some long abandoned, where nesting birds had moved in, some deserted but for the detritus of mourning: rusting crucifixes, broken stained glass roundels, an atmosphere loaded with pathos, nostalgia and a calm eerie silence. Portraits and family photographs on gravestones had become stained and broken with weather and water ingress. These images remained the most potent of my whole trip and could not be ignored.
I imagined who these people might have been and what life they might have led.
This got me thinking about the whole cycle from the tomb to the earth and back into life again, just as the seasons turn, but how long would remembrance last for from generation to generation and when might the link be lost or forgotten.
The result has been a series of paintings exploring the tombs, their shrines and the images found on many of the gravestones. Small pieces, in deep tablet like frames capture the feeling of glimpsing into a private space. A series of cameo-style portraits references the weathered photos of the near forgotten. In some of these I have used acrylic resin, softly overpainted to create the feel of encapsulation; in others I used layers of overwriting to convey memories and the passing of time.
The larger figurative pieces tread a fine line between reality and fantasy. Are they images of the beautiful spirits I could almost feel flit around me, while I perused their cemetery home? Or are they Dark Angels who have finally broken free of their tattered and cracked stone shells?
Landscape
I am drawn again and again to the North West and The Outer Hebrides, where the sense of life lived stuggling with nature is etched into the landscape. I convey this by drawing on elements where man has left his mark, for example lines and textures created by old stone walls, steadings and sheepfolds. I avoid the pastoral: if a scene is beautiful, it is a harsh beauty where man does not linger from his toil or the elements.
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