Touch has a memory
John Keats
I’m a landscape artist who works with printmaking, video, soundscape, photography and ceramics. My touchstone is the Swedish neologism fotminne, meaning ‘to remember with your feet’. I explore the idea that the natural landscape can mark the walker in such a way as to become a visceral imprint. Can we become so attuned to a particular place that our feet find their way instinctually?
I explore the ways folds, pleats and overlaps can be expressive of landscape and its layered history. The folds I make are an extrapolation from the Medieval method of ploughing the fields called ‘ridge and furrow’, in which the land is cut down into and then turned over to reveal a new topography. I try to entice the viewer to look closer, longer, underneath, in unexplored corners, often at floor level, to invite them to see the land anew. What lies beneath the surface, where does the shadow fall, what is hidden behind the bark of a tree? Constructed from etchings and photographs, my folded structures invite the onlooker inside as a form of visceral fotminne encounter. Each page of my folded book structures replicates the length of a footstep and I imagine that the viewer walks alongside my work both literally and figuratively.
I have a particular interest in the way the written and spoken word can be used in my practice and I combine my poetry with soundscapes, video and collaborative musical compositions. My experiments with word, sound and video are informed by my work as a writer and lecturer in English literature and as a former BBC radio documentary-maker working with quarter-inch magnetic tape.