I am attracted to text as art. Graffiti, asemic writing, Cyrillic script, Asian calligraphy and Pitmans shorthand. A hidden language that whispers of poetry and love. Success in art takes time and a whole lot of practice. It is the only thing that stands between you and your success.
I have been lucky to research and create art about a specific place on artist residencies. But it wasn’t always like that. In many cases it has taken years before my art about place could be be expressed as a placemaking ‘retrospective’.
Quite often my best art works are created really quickly. Things “just click” and the work literally makes itself. Other pieces I will labour over but these are not as successful as they have lost that initial “spark”. Knowing when to stop is key.
What happens when you get out of your daily rhythm? You have to get back into flow. There are seven positive small actions I took to get back into the rhythm of creating again in my studio after five months away.
We are our own worst critics. We have so many ideas around failure that it is easy to get discouraged. Yet all is not lost. When you adopt a “never give up” attitude your lost days can turn into blessings.
Holed up in a friend’s spare bedroom while recovering from Covid, I invited the world to come to me. Outside the sun is shining on an English summer and the back-garden where I take my meals to get some fresh air, yet I am drawn inside back to my bed and the world of stories as the hours and days slip by.
We can look to myths to help solve today’s problems. The Greenlandic figure of Sassuma Arnaa, the Mother of the Sea enshrines good practice for sustainable living. The 2022 UN Ocean Conference is endeavouring to do the same. On the agenda is a Universal Declaration of Ocean Rights. We have less than thirty years to get this right.
I returned from Greenland looking for ice in Iceland. I found it in the Perlan Museum in Reykjavik. Scientists and glaciologists in Iceland confidently predict that all of Iceland glaciers will disappear within the next 100 - 200 years. What will happen to Greenland?
The ice is leaving and fast. Getting up close and personal with a 250,000 year old glacier is an awe inspiring experience. Saying goodbye to a fast receding icesheet leaves me in deep grief about the future of Greenland and the world.
Your body knows when it needs rest. Ignore it at your peril. So I travelled while I slept and woke up to icebergs for breakfast. An inspirational reset in Greenland.
Trying something new can extend your world view. From creating a ceramic stone and holding it in my hand, to linking this with US President John F Kennedy’s often quoted line “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”
It’s easy to get lost in the big picture, the huge landscape and forget the details, That’s when I find it's necessary to pull focus. Which is what I did by visiting Petra’s stone collection, the inspirational garden of Iceland’s most famous stone collector, naturalist and stone artist.
Is great art political? From Eurovision to the Archibald Art prize winner, this week has seen great art making strong political statements with the eyes of the world watching.
How do you become unstuckable as an artist? When inspiration dries up, or you’re feeling too tired or stressed to create, what do you do? That’s where a daily practice can save your day and inspire you to keep going.
In an Icelandic town known for its postcard beauty, trouble looms ahead. Still reeling from an avalanche nearly 18 months ago, the small town of Seydisfjördur is about to have industrial fish farms in the fjord. Locals are up in arms and the arty community is rallying.
Being gifted Gaelic titles for some of my artworks while in Scotland has given me the key to a map of landscape. My accordion fold artist book Pilgrim Stranger with its Gaelic name Coigrich Taistealach has unlocked this landscape as a place of mystery which I have entered as a pilgrim.
You can never un-know what you know. In the midst of extraordinary beauty at my artist residency at Cove Park, I discover that just over the peninsular is the UK’s largest nuclear submarine facility. It is almost as if, in the midst of beauty, we need to scar the landscape in the most spectacularly catastrophic way. How to make art to reflect this?
Each place and landscape has its own story, but it is relative to who is the storyteller. Shetland for me is about knitted jumpers and the BBC series Shetland. As I walked along the streets of Lerwick, rain shimmering on wet concrete, I felt like I was a character in the this story of place and identity.
Every time I get nervous or feel under pressure to perform, I remember to let the work develop itself, to find its own story that needs to be told. This is what happened when my photograph of two chimneys became a metaphor for dispossession in a series of artworks devised at my artist residency.
Stone Circles, houses of stone and hills of ancient rock form a narrative of time, place and human interaction with this animate landscape in the Outer Hebrides. They are the beginning of my Stone Stories project.
