The Black Ground iV

I am recording my experience of walking the Taw and Torridge Estuaries, a place where I spent many holidays as a child and where my Grandmother lives still, as she turns one hundred this year. She has dementia now so that her stories of the place have become more unreliable, I am trying to capture a sense of possible past histories layered within the work, both captured from my walks and from conversations with other people and research into local histories and geology. I paint and draw on the OS maps as I walk, often using earth and pigment collected as I walk. Layers are buried under semi-translucent layers of gesso so that ghost images can be seen behind the surface. I track my walks using GPS, the final motif are shapes of the walking routes taken to make the work.