“Before it can ever be the repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock”. (Schama, S. 1995: 6-7)
My drawings are resonances of an inherited history, enduring marks left in or on a solid surface by a continuous movement. They are all these little implications that fluttered around in every mark, traced in a surface, sequences of my ‘mood of drawing’, becoming a revelation, a legacy of meaning. I am able to manipulate the object, writing my own history, full of reflection, of culture, external things of history of memory; unspeakable things you will never capture in words. And the way I do this is an expression of something.
Landscape is not simply what we see, but a way of seeing: we see it with our eye but interpret it with our mind and ascribe values to landscape for intangible and spiritual reasons. Landscape can be seen as a cultural construct in which our sense of place and memories are inherited. But memory of landscape is not always associated with pleasure. It can be associated sometimes with loss, with pain, with social fracture and a lost sense of belonging, although memory remains. We laud our virtues and achievements through iconic landscape imagery, often forgetting that equally the ordinary everyday landscape reflects deeply who we are and is a store of private and collective memories.
“Drawing is seen to be one of the most important elements in educating the eye and in
developing visual perception – itself a matter of visual concepts and habitual
structures”. (Rawson, P. 1987: 17)
This project is inspired by views of Northumberland (in the north of England) by the
wood engraver, naturalist and one of Northumberland's greatest artists, Thomas
Bewick.
For this conceptual project I made 273 drawings. For each drawing, I coated part of
the surface of the paper with gum Arabic then for seven seconds applied ivory black
pigment rhythmically with a brush to the prepared part.