Detail from String of Pearls

Collaged images are tied on with thick cotton. ‘Between the carpet and the string of pearls’ is one of the first finished prints from a series of ten unique hand burnished woodcuts with mixed media started in 2011. The negotiation of boundaries of behaviour and territory are constant themes in my work, generally with an implied landscape base. Investigating similar ideas but in the close confines of interior spaces, an idea of carpets is substituted for terrain. The so important gaps between us are sometimes un-navigable. The pattern begins to unravel. Uneasy passages open up between the oil crayoned heads as printed words in old fashioned fonts float through the impenetrable space. ‘Between the carpet and the string of pearls’ references the poem ‘A Woman with a Rug’ by George Szirtes. He refers to a painting by Vermeer, ‘while time begins to warp around his carpet covered table’. On transparent Indian hand made paper reflecting the fragility of life, imagery bleeds through from both front and back of the works.