Projects
Holly Cottage: view
A square window and a four-by-two table, unashamedly positioned to look into the landscape and try to ‘see’ this new environment with its changing days of light, dark and season.
Nearby the rolling Wolds of land and sky offer space; and beyond the sea.
The paintings, done as and when, are a device, grounding me into this new experience.
Soundtrack for slides
Gnomon
Where does a story begin, where is the beginning of the sense of place?
A snatch of conversation, an acknowledgement of feeling, facts and fiction, a weaving web of time and place.
The site for the GNOMON commission is SUNFIELD, an independent specialist school and children’s home located on 58 acres in the beautiful Clent Hills of the West Midlands.
Vernal Equinox: 28 degrees
Three artists, Helen Garbett, Rosa Ferris and myself were invited to respond to the exhibition ‘Experience Colour’, as a precursor to this we read together Rudolph Steiner’s lectures one and two exploring colour.
Experience Colour, developed in Switzerland, at the Goetheanum explores the nature of colour from the perspectives of science and art, philosophy and education, its presentation at Ruskin Glass Centre was the first U.K. venue.
Individually we developed our own questions: –
I explored the nature of green as the balance of blue and yellow, relating this to the Vernal Equinox, it being one of the two occasions during the year when the balance of day and night, light and dark are equal.
I wanted to explore these phenomena through the context of the solar and lunar cycles with the outcome of this enquiry to be some sort of hand-held form, suggestive of an orientation tool.
I found this an inspiring and rewarding project to be involved in.
- The moon reflects the sunlight, measured out through thirteen lunar months of the year, each being of twenty-eight days: time and tide.
- The measure of the year is a cycle of light and dark, as the earth moves on its axis around the sun.
- Twice a year light or dark reaches its apogee: Solstice.
- At two points in the year light and dark, day and night, are in equal measure: Equinox.
- When light and dark decrease in their intensity we experience them respectively as yellow and blue, when these two colours merge we experience green.
Swing of the Earth
Projects sometimes have beginnings very early in one’s life, the Moon for example was always a fascination for me as a child; much later, as part of my studio practice I began making Moonstones as a meditation at the times of the full moon, bringing them together in various combinations as seen in Time-Table.
Neolithic cultures, and beyond, have expressed through monument and artefact questions of our relationship to the cosmos, to observe and measure time, tide and season.
Swing of the Earth has these concerns, if you like it is a loop on the journey of my moon-inquiry, sometimes these loops take a long time to manifest, a period of incubation.
The cycles of the Moon appear to us as a repetition of changing form from full to new, from round to hidden, this pathway, is in part, responsible for our tides.
Musing upon this phenomenon, I connect the transiting moon with the beads of a necklace, a Moon-Necklace encircling the earth, a treasured gift.
Conversely the cyclical Moon-Necklace can be re-strung to express the Swing of the Earth, the movement of our great oceans.
