Our House is Falling Painting

Made as part of the new collection to be launched at The Other Art Fair in London this autumn called From Earth and Sea. I have made a series of works which are works of longing, reconnecting me to the places that were precious to me in my childhood. I grew up in the south West of England near to the ancient sites of Stonehenge and the various ancient barrow sites of Dorset and near to the coast. We spent summer holidays on Cornwall for a long period of my childhood and I have a special connection to this part of the country which I was unable to visit for the most part in the last year and a half due to covid. There is a longing in these pieces, for a connection to this ancient area, which holds within it material traces of human interconnection which is at the heart of my work. The relief of being able to visit, to see family and link back to these places is at the heart of this work. the paintings in this collection are made form pigments which have a direct link to the history of place, most of them hand made in the studio by me. The blue of this painting is woad, the orange from a beach combed brick, which was the result of landfall, the grey a mud rock saved from the sea as it was about to be washed away, the pink tone madder. Madder and woad have been traded trough the coastal routes with Europe for hundreds of years. The Murdock was ancient in the Jurassic era as it was already a product of erosion at that time..this work holds evidence of cyclic life, so that as well as longing and tragedy there is comfort here.