Read here about past work
Artist’s Statement 2024
'One World' Painted-Collages
In this series of 'painted-collages' I let my curiosity lead me into an intuitive form of exploration and play with colour, texture and mark-making. This process took me on a journey through different feeling and emotional states, with themes emerging and developing as I freely cut into my painted papers and collaged the different shapes together into final images.
The larger painted collages evolved from many smaller works also featuring a central circular. This recurring circular image, came to symbolise for me the sun, moon or earth, and other shapes and marks suggested the movement of the sea, underwater fish forms ... and sometimes a bridge.
I am interested in the role of ritual in art and life which is something I explored with my daughter Gabby in her sound-vision piece 'Call to Ritual'. Gabby brought my 'One World' mages to life through her ingenious editing process; my painted papers and shapes came to life as they moved and merged, and were accompanied by a soundscape combining music with found-sound and distant voices echoing the mood of my painted-collages..
(This work shown on a large screen in the theatre at An Lanntair on the Isle of Lewis as part of the 'Hands Across the Sea' conference (find a link to this piece in my 'news' page).
'One World' Painted-Collage wooden Bangles
I have always liked the idea of making 'wearable art' which has meaning beyond the purely decorative; items worn as talismans and charms and so on ...
One day, picking up a wooden bangle I had in the studio, I started collaging it with left over painted paper from my One World collages. I worked my way around the bangle collaging it with similar archetypal symbols of sun, moon, earth, sea, oceans, fish, boats and bridges; while making these works I sensed an echo of forgotten ancestral ritual, rites of passage, ceremony and symbolic sea crossing ... perhaps made by my distant Scottish ancestors? I ask myself if in the process of making art, I am being called to my own kind of ritual?