I have always regarded drawing as my way of coming to grips with an idea on the assumption that if I can generate a satisfactory graphic solution, I shall have reached a more complete understanding of its subject.
These works are culled from the last thirty years of my practice and are the first opportunity that I have taken to pull them together as a single group.
More recently, I have become preoccupied by the immediacy of our environmental predicament. For me, drawing represents a way into this debate. Through it I feel able to negotiate the huge range of specialist data that might otherwise reduce me to a sense of impotence.
I am convinced that it is possible to lay claim to these issues as cultural phenomena and to develop strategies for how they can be possessed in a wider public context.
This exhibition was an opportunity to discuss the role that the arts can develop in articulating environmental change.
The Cut Arts Centre
8 New Cut
Halesworth
Suffolk
IP19 8BY
Light Reflecting off a Dark Surface – Gibbous Moon 1992
In making this drawing I was intrigued by what a limited medium like pencil could accomplish and it spawned more explorations into a kind of inert luminosity.
The drawing here is the last drawing of a loose series and was prompted by the observation that its dark powdery, rocky surface is not very reflective.
In fact the intense silvery light is all of the sun’s illumination that is reflected back to the earth.
This rather unscientific conundrum was sufficient to prompt me to dwell upon the idea of light reflected by an unreflective body.
By allowing the moon to be in its gibbous phase it becomes a moment in time and a means by which I could avoid stereotype.
