Growing Ideas

There are times when, as an artist, you feel like you just make things for the sake of it. This is mostly true but occasionally something happens and a piece of art just appears. This particular project started with a piece of my Christmas cactus being accidentally broken off. Me being me, I picked it up and decided to pot it in the hopes it would grow. However, without any fresh soil or a pot I cut up a milk carton and filled it with soil just dug up from a verge in the garden. This seemed to do the job and it began growing but so did all the seeds and things that were already in the soil.

Feeling kind of happy at the prospect of mysterious plants I decided not to weed it and let them grow and boy did they grow. I now have a very green window box fashioned from an old milk carton. With the thought of this unexpected life I went to work on the Isle of Mull, taking one of my casts with me. On arrival I started an experiment where I filled the cast with soil from the surrounding area. Watering it and caring for it as though there were seeds in it produced a beautiful effect. Everyday I wrote a short entry of my observations and everyday there was something new.

Life is all around us from the undisturbed seeds of plants long forgotten to a billion bacteria living in a teaspoon of soil. There is a lot more to the world than we sometimes expect and if we stop for a moment to watch it, to see it growing and changing we might see something beautiful.

Day 63, Week 9, 02/08/19

”The little forest seems to both grow slowly and quickly as the weeks go by. The vast variety astounds me. The whole cast has become a tangle of fine new greenness. A miniature forest of life in a landscape of information. When I get up close it is easy to get lost in its intricacies and imagine walking among them like an ant.”

[Extract from daily observational diary]

‘Growing Ideas’ – 2019

Site or Sight

There is a playful conflict in my work, which has become a more muted examination of nature’s sublime majesty, brought to the foreground by unnatural materials and forms within this latest project.

Continue reading “Site or Sight” →

Unfocused

I find the city at night to have an eerie kind of peacefulness. The lights and colours seem decadent, illuminating deserted shops and buildings. I took these on new years eve and managed to catch a couple of fireworks from the top of the crags in Edinburgh.

Artist’s Book “Connections”

Following on from Linescape and considering some of the same themes, “Connections” is an artists book with a sense of discovery and playfulness. Each disc or ‘page’ is 15cm across making this book very large and weighty. This brings an earthy, grounding element to the work, which compliments the subtle links to landscapes and the natural environment.

Artist Book ‘Connections’ – 2017

An Island in a City Sea

Pulled out of personal experience of Environment, “An Island in a City Sea” combines natural and synthetic materials that form a changing liminal space dictated by light and the combination of poetry along side sculpture. Man and nature, two sides of the same coin and yet so looked upon as enemies, a contrast, if you will, of interests.

An island in a city sea,

No mountain but to us could be,

The mound of rock, of earth, of stone,

A place we seem to be alone.

Yet all around the light of day,

At night seeps in and comes to stay.

‘An island in a city sea’ – 2017

City Worm

Drawing from the space between wilderness and city, these sculptures explore light as a parasite in a natural environment. The piece of gorse bush wood was stripped and carved into, creating holes which the glow sticks worm their way through. This is a work in progress.