A Thread Of Light: Exhibition
2010 |
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| Birch Diptych |
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| Bend |
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| Birch Sketch (detail) |
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When I was a child we stopped once on a journey
North to walk in the silence of Culbin Forest. There we found the exquisite and rare one-flowered wintergreen. This is one
of my most precious memories.
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| One Loch, Two Days |
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| Dark Mirror |
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| Mountain Flower |
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In recent years the risk of imminent ecological crisis has become
a huge factor in our lives. For a while I found it hard even to glance towards the future, so fearful were the things it seemed
likely to contain. Then in 2008 I was invited to spend time in the Rocky Mountains. There in the blasted high landscape we
found tiny, exquisite flowers amongst the shattered rock. These flowers moved me very much. Their delicate perfection and
the tension between their vulnerability and tenacity seemed to encapsulate a sense that life and by implication beauty could
persist against the most difficult odds.
The work in this exhibition
considers the fine line between the presence and absence of life and the way this changes everything. For life to exist certain
conditions have to be in place and so value judgements of good/beneficial and bad/detrimental come into play. The indifferent
and haphazard forces of nature become imbued with meaning. |
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Dark uncertainty and imagined catastrophe still occupy the unknown
and unseen parts of our world, but as H.G. Wells wrote in “The Time Machine”, his vision of a decadent future
where all natural risk has been eliminated, “intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger and
trouble . . . There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.”
The past may be known and the future in doubt, but the appearance of both can change when viewed
through different emotional filters. Uncertainty and challenge belong in our lives as much as the capacity to perceive beauty
and experience hope. |
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| Rim |
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| Many Moons |
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“And I have by me now, for
my comfort, two strange white flowers . . . to witness that . . . gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the
heart of man.”
- H.G. Wells “The Time Machine”
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| First Foliage |
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