My residency with Art Licks in Bransdale has enabled me to start developing new work in response to time spent in the landscape. Exploring the text, The Green Child by Herbert Read, I have begun to ‘site’ drawings and collages within the buildings at Cow Syke and amidst the surrounding landscape – including a specific field where I set up studio outdoors during the two weeks spent in the vale. Exploring the topography of the landscape and combining this with my own visual vocabulary of motifs / geometric shapes, I have begun to investigate the contrasts between the two.

When working back in the studio, and beginning to compose drawings, I use collections of natural forms gathered from key locations around Cow Syke – including Hodge Beck, The Mill, the grounds around Cow Syke itself, and the adjacent farmer’s field. These objects not only affirm a physical link back to the location and the magic imbued within each one, but they are also used to form the shapes within the drawings, and feature as collaged items within the works themselves.

Taking excerpts from Read’s novel as starting points for individual artworks, the words have been layered underneath what is visible in terms of heavily worked graphite layers. As the drawings develop, the writing is illegible but continues to play a role metaphorically in building up the layers in the work with references to the social history of the location.

The drawings themselves have been part of a series of works that I have been developing since 2020 and, also part of a longer history of drawing practice that employs found surfaces as a starting point. Discarded cardboards and de-constructed, aged boxes have been the most recent ‘grounds’ for the work, and these drawings are aligned with Robert Rauschenberg’s rejection of pre-determined ‘ideas’ and a ‘trust in materials’, as each drawing is indebted to the surface to which they respond (Hunter, 2016). Frequently yellowed with age and stains, the supports testify to previous use, human relationships and social exchange. Using found materials enables the superimposition of marks in relation to the personal history of the surface.

My practice has often seen the repetition of a motif – a form that becomes so familiar and explored in large volumes for several years. The process allows for other variables to take precedence and becomes aa way ‘into’ the work. In recent years the motif has been a ‘head’ shape and during the residency, these ‘heads’ allowed me to think about those who has frequented the vale over many generations and, through the process of drawing, feel more connected to those from the past. Geometric shapes representing ‘blockages’ or ‘openings’ and the recurring motif of smiling mouths, aim to unravel the social constructs around the unsaid and non-verbal interaction.