My work begins with space and line – the space of the paper offering a broad field across which I draw out an initial structure. The piece unfolds slowly as colour and further structures are added over a period of time. Attention to detail and care taken during the making of each work achieves a balance: colour, luminescence and perceptual shift gradually coming together. The title ‘Colour Separation’ alludes to the separation of colour in photographic and printing processes. While my earlier photographic practice asked the camera, counter-intuitively, to respond to the non-visual, such as sound or smell, more recent work can be read partly as a meditation on aspects of optics and the photographic such as time, light, focus, refraction, transposing these concerns to the painted and the drawn, with an emphasis on touch and the hand.
In ‘Colour Separation (IV) - Wheat and Thistle’ (watercolour and graphite on paper, 2024),shades of ochre and mauve repeat across the surface of the paper, their values shifting and changing subtly in tone and hue. Gentle waves and undulations appear gradually during the process of making, the structures and colours coexisting in an emerging dialogue. Initially this work was inspired by the surprising experience of colour in masses of flowering thistle dusting fields of wheat in the foothills of the Pyrenean mountains.