Studio Collection 2022
By 2022 I needed something to give me the challenge of a long term project that would allow for experimentation and give me a diversity of creative subject matter and it had to be Climate Change. I have been watching the inevitable creep of global warming slowly gathering pace since the mid 1980’s and now it is an unstoppable juggernaught and I have to respond to its overwhelming effects on the planet. My initial body of work is entitled ICE, it will be followed by FIRE, DROUGHT and FLOOD in subsequent years.
As research I read scientific reports and looked at images of arctic landscape which actually made me more afraid and depressed for the future and it had the initial effect of pushing my work into Artivism. Sometimes as artists we cannot control how we will be affected by a subject, I didn’t expect to find it so difficult to respond the seeming inevitable loss of the pristine arctic wilderness, in some ways I just wanted to paint ice landscapes because they were so beautiful and it felt like I was preserving them but with a message across them to express the anguish I felt at their imminent disappearance but I knew that I had to find ways of using the floral metaphors to express a less literal message and allow them and the process of layering paint to reflect my passion. I showed my first body of work at the Manchester Art Fair 2022.
