Datganiad/Statement 

 

My work is informed by the archetypal motif of the quest into the dark forest, evoking transformative journeys through imagined inner worlds.

 

This series of etchings was made during lockdown. Echoing our curtailed view of the world, each composition grew from tiny sections of an etching I made after walking through a forest pre-lockdown, which I then quested into as if it were a huge landscape. The driving idea was to imaginatively leave the cultivated garden of the known world and venture into the chaotic and transformative inner wild, and to tell the stories that I found there.  On the copper plates, I used semi-permeable etching grounds I made myself out of soap, pigments, oils and inks, pouring and manipulating them to build the image and then biting them intuitively. Some are unprocessed single-state images: others contain many layers of thought and revision.