SHIFT (Somerset’s Brilliant Coast)

The COVID-19 pandemic created an inextricable frame within which I re-established my relationship with my local coast.  I was unlearning how to paint.

I created paints from mud-stones and rocks collected along the Somerset Coast. Making videos of rocks, studying geological slides, drawing with seagull feathers, sieving, pouring and draining mud; all jostled together in the process of creating these unpredictable and fluid paintings.

I embarked upon a ‘sporadic, nomadic residency’ along the Somerset coast, to test the efficacy of my work. Covid-19 lockdowns cut-short my plan to work my way along the coast, inviting questions, playful encounters and practical daubings with mud paints with willing beach visitors. The conversations, surprises and social interactions stimulated by the paintings and their process synthesised with my own studio-based experiments to help shape the works. 

These paintings, using the most ancient of painterly processes, investigate ideas of coast, tidal shifts, the dynamic equilibrium of marine and shore ecology, the deep time compressed within the layers of rock, the continual process of change and erosion which defines the ecotone of this fragile coast. I was testing the function of painting to engender a deepened connection with the coast.