EXHIBITIONS
& Series
This green Rainforest Series is my response to being in the rainforest of the Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica. As with all my work, each painting evolves organically as I engage in a mindful, open-ended dialogue with it. I paint, sand and etch the rough plaster of Paris surface that I have created. This process is repeated countless times and my imagination is on full alert, looking for possible forms to emerge and colour tones that instinctively feel right. In this current series, suggestions of tropical vegetation take shape, as well as other biomorphic forms, which I bring out (or not) depending on if I judge them to belong in the overall scheme of the piece. I often find that birds make appearances, as if they have flown in. (I am reminded of Jacques Prévert’s poem: ‘Pour faire le Portrait d’un Oiseau’.)
I aim to engage the viewer in a process of exploratory and imaginative ‘slow looking’. As when looking for wild life, patient observation is the key to seeing what is there.
In the most recent painting,(Left) ‘A small, quiet Bird flew into the Rainforest’, a barely visible, tiny bird appeared in the light-filled clearing in the wild, dark forest. For me, this relates to the biblical “still, small voice” that speaks through earthquake, wind and fire.
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Lockdown Drawings
June 2020
This series of 40 works was made during Lockdown. The daily practice of drawing them was both an expression of and a release from this strange situation.
I first started working like this as a student at Wimbledon and earlier drawings like this featured in my Degree Show. I was influenced by the drawings of Georges Seurat.
The process I use is in a way ‘sculptural’, in that I use erasers to “chip away ” at the forms. The latter emerge from an instinctive, organic engagement with the simple materials of charcoal and acid-free cartridge paper, which I first incise with a sharp point so that the marks appear as fine, white lines in the finished pieces. To paraphrase the writer Michèle Roberts: I draw from the unconscious about the unconscious.
Thinking about your set of drawings, to me they collectively represent a discrete segment of time in which you were going through a particular experience, not separate from your life, but distinct, identifiable, like the journal of a journey. Their intimacy is conveyed not only in their marks and forms, but in their scale.
– Eileen Richardson