Art Practice Rooted in Landscape and Geology
The Hide
August 9, 2025
This year has unfolded with an incredible energy—community-focused, creatively rich, and full of meaningful connections in London. Now I’ve landed in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, for my residency, and something quieter, deeper is beginning to take root.
Being here feels like an alignment. I’m grateful—aware that these windows of creative focus and environmental immersion are rare. And with that gratitude comes a subtle pressure: to honour the support I’ve received, the interest in my work, and my own need to feel genuinely engaged. The work must come from a place of truth and curiosity, not just productivity.
My residencies tend to begin with a kind of unraveling—mental noise dissolves, intuition steps forward. I arrived with proposals, research, and ideas, including a deep dive into the geology and quarrying history of the area. That remains a thread. But I’ve shelved it, for now, in favour of something more immediate, more bodily.
One morning, I found myself pruning the tangled willow bush just outside the studio door. Without much forethought, I began shaping a primitive structure—using low-tech, ancient methods from basketry to bind and bend the material. It felt honest. Responsive. The beginnings of something sculptural emerging from a quiet encounter with place.
What matters most to me right now is drawing. It’s the foundation—deciding whether a form wants to remain on paper, translate into painting, or take on dimensionality. I’ve been hesitant to explore three-dimensional work more fully due to the logistics of moving, storage, and shipping. But here, with space and time, I’m allowing that interest to unfold again—photographing, experimenting, and letting the process spill outward.
The environment is impossibly beautiful—steep, layered hills, dense woodlands, dry-stone walls, and homes built from the honey-coloured oolite limestone quarried below. Drawing here is becoming a kind of mapping. Not just of landscape, but of structure, body, and memory. Stone as material and metaphor. Home as a concept embedded in the cloth trade, the architecture, and the geology—solid foundations rising from deep time.
This place is a counterpoint to the urgency and density of London. Here, time bends. I walk past hedgerows, forage blackberries, trace footpaths, watch the light shift across the valley. The silence isn't empty—it’s textured. And in that stillness, my inner voice grows more audible, more certain.
In next week’s blog, I’ll begin to unpack how these threads are weaving together—drawing, material, place, and gesture.
