Fracture

My framework of reference is autobiographical. The ‘scar’ drawings were begun in November 2011 following the end of my time coordinating a Heritage Lottery funded project which set out to explore the life of a soldier through the visual arts. Being involved with active servicemen, war artists, veterans and staff at the Imperial War Museum all served to open doors on my own knowledge of conflict. Towards the end of the two year project I had the opportunity to mentor and work alongside a 26 year old serviceman. Together we explored moments in time experienced within a war zone situation. I dug deep but with an overriding obstacle – the fact that I had no photographs from this period of my life (on arriving in England I had systematically destroyed them - they seemed to warrant staying unrevealed). I produced a small but significant body of work, mostly oil on canvas and essentially landscape, narrating this time, concerned with a feeling of place fermented in the memory – drawn more to what happened there in those spaces. Having kept a notebook from this collaboration these ‘scar’ drawings are an extension of this storying. They are neither didactic nor rhetorical. They are the facts accompanying the threats associated with survival and the effects on the human spirit.