Stirring Up the Sea Bed

This piece is part of the Small Ports and Sea Coves collection which grew out of researching the arena of my childhood holidays, places which formed me and my ideas of the world and also of beauty. I grew up near to the coast of Dorset and visited regularly. We went on holiday to Cornwall every year for the first 9 years of my life.

In the background are the stories of piracy, smuggling and privateering . The notion of hiding in plain sight. The way in which booty was hidden just below the surface the way in which the low tide may reveal all. The way a changing landscape makes something possible that was not possible before, and the way that layers of meaning are hidden within.

Form
The abstract forms in these paintings contain echoes of the material reality of the South West Coast
The particularity of the South West Coast of England with its small coves comes as a result of the impact of sea erosion on the land which was formed as a result of a dynamic geological history, involving heat and magma, periods of cool and water, volcanic activity and ice, the movement of tectonic plates, intrusion and metamorphosis. Bands of rock of differing densities hit the coast, and are eroded at different speeds, as the sea pierces a harder band a cove forms as it reaches the softer band behind it. Over millions of years the earth moved.

Material basis
The mining related pigments are based on iron, copper, aluminium and kaolin.
The sea trade based pigments are indigo, woad, ochres and madder.
Then there is mud-rock ochre a pigment derived by the artist from the earth of the Jurassic coast, from a clay formed from eroded materials before people walked on the earth. And sea brick ochre hand made in the studio from bricks from cliff fall houses collected from the beach where they have been eroded in the sea.