Foresters tern

I drew inspiration for these works from the wild and wind-battered Norfolk coastline, where I held a studio residency in 2014.  My palette began to soften to include murky and Romantic sea greens and stormy blues, although vivid moments of urbane post-punk pink and night-crawler black remain. I felt inspired by the enormous range of lurid colours in nature – the gold and vermillion of fauna and flora: signals of attraction and danger and all the life-and-death struggles. At the heart of each of these new images is a fury of beaks, encircled by fanlike, semi-abstracted wings. The result is an aviary of attack and defence, intimating the basic fight-or-flight behaviour of even the most diminutive of birds. I have become increasingly concerned with the edges of my paintings and drawings, often extending them out with quasi-sculptural elements, such as painted and concertinaed canvas, or long thin strips of wood resembling thin shelves or props. I also see these as continuing my interest in codes and signals; akin to war fans as both weapons and shields in the Samurai arsenal or the use of fans in codified symbolic rituals in eighteenth-century France to indicate one’s sexual availability.