"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious."
- Albert Einstein
From wisps of sketches my ideas are developed on the plate. As the plate evolves stage by stage, layers of meaning are added to the first impulse, which may have been a gesture, or attitude that hinted at something else.
These heads and figures for me are about the strangeness and beauty of life and the nearness of death. My inspiration lately has come from diverse areas, life itself, the above quote, the second movement of Beethoven's seventh. The ideas for the gates came from beautiful doorways in Santander, Parisian wrought iron and Jim Dine's lithographs of Cromelynk's gates.
Etching is an interesting way to explore the qualities of eroding wrought iron. The idea of barriers keeping us in or out or letting us through interests me and I like the juxtaposition of the flat forms and the rounded three-dimensional figure prints.
The plates are etched many times, sometimes deeply, sometimes lightly, using different grounds and methods until a complex relief surface is arrived at. Mistakes are ground out and re etched until satisfactory. I have learnt that it is when a plate seems beyond redemption that it can almost always be hauled back, and that the fight often makes the difference in the quality of the etching plate. At the end sometimes, apparently random lines are quite violently dry pointed into the surface, or rippled on with acid, to put an energetic barrier between viewer and image. This could be signifying time, space or just the impossibility of complete understanding, and gives the feeling of an electrical charge, and liveliness.
Images occur through observation, memory, and imagination. Some of the prints connect with past works of art, for example, The Baby may have echoes of Leonardo's drawing of a baby still in the womb, and Woman with Mirror may remind one of the stillness of Vermeer and Two Figures of Michelangelo's Pieta. My colours hint at elements like stone and metal, and the quality of light in certain meteorological conditions.
I feel that one of the most interesting points of my work is that I have the ability to ink up the plates in many different combinations of colour. This gives me the opportunity to obtain many moods and sometimes even different meanings, and allows the customer to choose the work that means most to them, or would fit well into an existing situation in their home. My work is not abstract but does allow the viewer space to muse.
I have recently a first class Hons. degree from Canterbury Christchurch University College. I am now studying for an M.A