In my last piece of critical reflection writing, I divided my thinking into three main themes: landscape, intimate immensity and memory.  Landscape has become less of a primary area for my research, though it continues to serve as the basis for my exploration of memory and intimate immensity.  Instead, I have become more interested in memory and loss: its relation to place and landscape; ways of containing and preserving those memories and emotions in the face of unreliable and fragmented memory; and the duality of those emotions – simultaneously personal and universally salient.

Landscape has continued to be the basis of my practice, with the photographic images that I have been working with of a more introspective nature – looking down at the small and the overlooked, rather than out at the sublime.

My intention in making the piece “Last Walk with Dad” was to preserve, in a tangible form, the memory of a moment that we spent together; to create a vehicle for that memory that was portable, that kept the memory safe and preserved it for the future. In creating this piece, I began to reflect on the fallibility of memory and the urge that I have, as I move further away in time from my early memories and from my parents, to try to capture, somehow, a moment in time and space and the accompanying sensations or emotions. Photographs don’t seem to do those moments justice, can’t capture the matrix of sensory and emotional information that encapsulates that day, or morning, or 20 minutes one evening. This desire to capture or encapsulate is not a new one – like most people, I will collect objects – souvenirs or totems such as a shell, a pebble, a feather – with which I will associate the memory in the future, something to help me recall it and experience it again.

In thinking about intimacy and inviting a sense of it in my work, I find something particularly introspective and intimate in looking down.  I felt that the piece ‘Last Walk with Dad’ had invited intimacy and engagement quite effectively: the sense of something precious, personal, fragile that required close inspection and focus.  So, I thought that continuing to present work on the horizontal plane and below the eyeline would facilitate the feeling of being asked to engage in a more intimate way with the work.

I felt that this worked well with ‘Resolve to Infinity’ where bright sunlight from the window actually forced people to shield the screen from the glare to be able to see the film – enacting an additional form of protection to the box and its contents - simply to enable them to properly engage with and understand it.  In a gallery of many large-scale and bold pieces, I felt that this piece held its own, perhaps by piquing the curiosity of viewers in its contrast to the rest of the room.

As a result, titles have become important in my work as a way that I can communicate that duality: Last Walk With Dad lends personal meaning to what otherwise seems to be a work based around nature and conveys a sense of the loss  - or fear of loss - which will be familiar to most; A Couple of Hours on a Wednesday in February at the South Coast with the Sunshine and a Rising Tide evokes the kind of fleeting moment where we have been surprised by the weather and unexpectedly gifted a few hours of freedom. This piece, which I showed as part of the Forces of the Small exhibition, actually sold – to another artist in the show who messaged me to say:

 “I have just opened it today and have experienced it in a whole new way, the seaweed ring, the slipper all inside the sea seed, it’s really beautiful.  For now, I have it wrapped up so I can do that again when I need to see the sea but can’t get there.”

 For my Bargehouse pieces, I used coordinates and a date for the large-scale relief print and the phrase ‘Resolve to Infinity’ for the video – a reference to the importance of ‘optical defocus’ to the development and maintenance of our visual acuity – that is that gazing at the horizon or distant views actively prevents myopia (Smith, 2011). I think these worked less well – less poignant or potent and probably harder to discern the meaning. I also liked the playfulness of ‘A Couple of Hours…’ and the size of the title compared to the size of the work it described, thinking about vastness, scale and Bachelard’s idea of ‘intimate immensity’ (Bachelard et al.,2014).

During the crits at Bargehouse, one of the tutors seemed to be suggesting that my work wasn’t sufficiently strong – it was a more general point about group shows, but I inferred from the conversation taking place around my floor piece and the way he held eye contact with me that this was his perspective on my piece.  I have reflected on this quite a bit and I am not sure that I agree.  I do think that there are aspects of the piece that don’t work so well:  I had wanted a deep emboss from the woodcut and although there was some, it wasn’t particularly evident; I opted for only ambient light which, looking at how the spotlights worked on other pieces, was probably a mistake; there is a question for me about how much the image of round and ovoid pebbles and bubbles works with the geometry of the grids in the piecing together and folding.  At the same time, I think the piece held its own in a space full of bold, colourful works, which might have served to emphasise its quietness and delicacy; I also saw several visitors crouch down to get a closer look and spend time with the work, so I felt that elements of the materiality and process were speaking to at least some people.

The folding of this piece serves two purposes.  The first is my interest in the way that print sits at the boundary of 2D and 3D and wanting to push that more into the sculptural – building on the capacity for embossing in relief and intaglio printing and expanding into more obvious 3D forms.  Despite their geometry, the folds evoke landscape through the simple terminology of mountain and valley folds, but I also wanted to suggest navigation and cartography – containing and understanding the landscape and also the memories and emotions that the piece contains.  This allusion to maps and map reading reinforced the decision to show the piece horizontally, though perhaps at table height would have worked better – been more evocative and easier to look closely at (but I’m not sure how to resolve that with the idea that I had of the shallow waves of the shoreline at ankle level).

There is an overt element too of seeing landscape in an object.  I wanted to evoke landscape in the folds and valleys of ‘ 50° 55' 33”, 0° 45' 56” 08.02.23’ or suggest the vastness of the sea inside a tiny box, in a similar way to artist Jananne Al-Ani when she talks about “taking an object and transforming it back into a landscape that looked something like the landscape it might have come from” (Testar, 2022).  This idea was at the front of my mind when I was thinking about the ceramic pieces I made at the end of 2022 by pressing porcelain into my laser etched woodcuts – that there is something of the landscape in these objects which, through the iterative processes of image to woodcut to ceramic impression, become more and more detached from the original image, but at the same time very strongly suggest a landscape in miniature.

Loraine Rutt is an artist and cartographer who works in ceramics, producing these stunning, richly detailed globes that fit in the palm of your hand and are often presented in beautifully crafted wooden boxes.  Her work speaks to many of my current interests around miniaturisation, navigation, the personal alongside the universal.  There is also a strong sense of containing vastness – the whole world in the palm of your hand – a pleasing playing with outside and inside and a strong sense of protection or safekeeping about these pieces. 

These thoughts are behind one of my ideas for the July show: as part of my body of work, I wanted to create a piece that suggests the internal landscape of my memories through small porcelain tiles that are fragments of images that encapsulate specific moments for me. So, the landscape would be evident in the images that form the basis of the work, as well as the sculptural form of each tile and the overall effect of multiples massed together; vastness suggested through small, pocket-sized objects, simultaneously personal and universal.