Between drawing 1

The Between series began when I was sitting amongst long grasses, by standing stones.

I had spent a lot of time with my dog Orla in mutual appreciation of the sights, sounds and scents around us in this special place. Having said a sad but inevitable goodbye to her a few weeks before, the moment provoked specific memories but also seemed to conjure other, human bereavements reaching back generations, and deepened my reflections on the subject of loss and the preciousness of life.

Our responses to dislocation and pain are as varied and personal as our grief – mine was to draw, compulsively. I drew for two days, almost without stopping, and on the third day found I couldn’t draw any more.

When I took these drawings, which had almost drawn themselves, back to my studio, I found that many seemed to sit together as part of a bigger whole whilst retaining their individual resonance. There was a relaxed tension between them and I liked the contradiction.

How to describe this ‘Between’ which I found in front of me? Images of above and below ground, life and death, asleep and awake, dark and light, being at a threshold, positive and negative (shapes and mood)…were all there for me to see.

In the studio I worked on paper and also on wood, piecing sections of drawings together and working into them. I used recycled pieces of wood as I found them, leaving them at the size they were, only sanding the surface, then painting and sitting them together, drawing over their boundaries and stopping at others.

What emerged was an intuitive, unpredictable, only partly conscious process that, on reflection, seemed to mirror something of the complexity of our dark and light times.