"Echoes of Renewal in Rust (2024)" Painting

My work explores the inherent agency of rural landscape, manifested through the transient nature of both its animals and materials. I live in a rural town placed between Glasgow and Edinburgh, which holds a rich industrial heritage, situated off of the River Clyde. My practice is rooted at the juncture of painting and sculpture, exploring these moments in nature of collapse, of renewal and regeneration, of land ownership & place making. My love for colour is primary in my pursuit of art making and is something that I draw from landscape. As a characteristic of the lower forms of nature, colour is vastly mobile, an intangible sentiment which bleeds into the tactile values of art making. My process began and still does begin with a love for surface and space, it does so through a longstanding relationship with painting and drawing- Questioning notions of boundary, site specificity and materiality. Quite often, I am masking off, I am painting and repainting areas of the canvas. The surface of the work is layered with a lot of information, finding this balance is something I am still very much exploring, as at one stage, the abundance of information can crumble into a sea of nothing. So there needs to be this blank space, which collapses and coexists with the other side. Quiet retellings of landscape exist within my work, small moments that perhaps would otherwise go unnoticed. The animal wool caught up in the barbed wire, the brightly coloured rope binding together specific objects. I am in awe at the vastness of nature, of class cultures and local stories, of which my ex mining, Scottish town resides. There is a question of agency and of materials in nature, stories of Post Industrial decline in an ever changing environment.