Shelter

Mixed media on canvas Created in collaboration with poet Kate Innes as part of the Encounters project, exhibited at the VAN Gallery, Shrewsbury, October 2018 From a series of drawings and paintings inspired by walks in Shropshire and surrounding areas, in which I made observations of cabins, caravans and sheds of various kinds. Each place was evidently a place of previous or ongoing habitation, mostly by persons unknown. The circumstances of their abandonment are also unknown or ambiguous, but provoking curiosity. In their woodland surroundings, these places could be viewed as idyllic retreat or desperate refuge. In these works I contemplate primitive living from ancient human history and a dystopian future. Gaston Bachelard’s “Poetics of Space” was a reference in my reflections on these precarious living conditions.