The Anchoring Stone              

The Anchoring Stone
2026
Oil, oil stick, oil pastel and pigment on repurposed Welsh slate
46 × 38 cm

This painting developed from memories of Tenby Harbour, where boats, stone walls and tidal water create a landscape of shelter and departure. The slate’s weight and fractured edge suggest an anchoring object: something held between land and sea, permanence and movement. Layered marks evoke weathered harbour surfaces, submerged forms and the residue left behind by changing tides.

The work also carries a loose allusion to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, particularly its atmosphere of passage, burden and transformation at sea. Rather than illustrating a specific narrative, the painting imagines the stone as both anchor and witness—an object that holds memory while the world around it shifts.

Poem

At Tenby Harbour

The tide withdraws
but leaves its colour in the stone.

Boats lean into their ropes,
listening for the open water.

I carry no albatross,
only this weight—
a broken piece of land
that remembers the sea.