inspiration

Hanbury Hall delights

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My creative practice has been inspired by National Trust gardens for the last few years and as a result I’ve had a number of people suggest I visit Hanbury Hall – finally I got round to it at the weekend. Despite the poor weather it was a delight to discover all the pockets of gardens, each carefully considered, and demonstrating the wide variety of formal and informal planting the National Trust excels at.

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Armed with my sketchbook and camera I gathered plenty of inspiration for new prints and will definitely be back later in the season.

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Its also a fantastic building inside and out. I dashed around the inside and a particular wallpaper caught my attention.

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All in all, I left feeling excited about making new work again having spent so long preparing for my solo show at Tinsmiths, opening later this month… now where did I put that lino?

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YELLOW April

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Having noticed this week that the garden has suddenly started to change colour, I set about documenting all the yellow in the garden. Its not surprising at all that the photographs of the same flowers taken at different times of the day varied hugely, but I also recorded the range of yellows in the flowers of this very YELLOW season.

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working with nature and nature working with us

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One of the things that has inspired and influenced my creative practice is how we work with the land; to farm, build roads, wear the paths where we shouldn’t walk as well as create boundaries. These are signs of man asserting influence over nature, and the natural landscape. Of course the way things were thousands of years ago will never return but modern-day farm machinery and larger field sizes are two things that have shaped our contemporary countryside.

I have never quite understood topiary but am intrigued when I see orchards with heavily structured boughs, turning a natural system in to a geometric diagram. We ask nature to do what it does not naturally want to do. We expect plants to grow in the wrong soils, because we like the look of them despite our climate, and we can be unforgiving if a ‘weed’ dares to grow where we don’t want it to.

With this in mind I do like to see subversive and anarchic challenges from nature, and nature trying to make its mark where it shouldn’t. Like graffiti on the wrong walls; art in a gallery, vandalism on the streets, plants do sometimes have their own agenda. I found this beautiful plant surviving, flourishing even, in the mortar of a very old wall in Ledbury. It made me laugh. It wasn’t the usual ivy or buddleia, but a beautiful primula, proud as punch of its achievements. Okay, so the leaves are rather small relative to the flower heads but I couldnt help feeling rather pleased for it too.

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the end of one season and the start of the new.

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At the start of the harvest time last year I shared with you our first crops of the season. Today I cleared the brassicas that have been under attack from pigeons all winter – much to my distress, and planted in their place the potatoes for the coming year. It was a sign of handing over the baton to another year of potential, involving the weather, our effort, opportunities for head-space and the reward in what we get to eat.

Each year we start with a revised planting plan, more back ache, a new set of gloves and opportunities for me to draw and record the plants to provide further inspiration for my art and design work. As I have also spent the last few days designing, cutting and printing new lino blocks, the creative process of doing so reminds me very much of being a gardener; working with the elements and using knowledge, intuition, skill, time and desire to create something from small beginnings.

I remain positive about the growing season ahead, surely there cant be as many slugs and pigeons this year… can there? And as for cutting lino, I’m in it for the long haul.

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holding on to the details…

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This photo was taken at Birmingham’s old science museum in its last days before demolition as I was carrying out research for subsequent commissions inspired by the site. It goes some way to sum up how things are in the studio at the moment with many lists and scraps of precious information as I am very busy with making new prints & promoting my upcoming show at Tinsmiths, Ledbury next month as well as coordinating suppliers and working on exciting new design work. All this in the break between Spring and Summer terms of my lecturing job…

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geometrics out and about: PLAIDS

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There are particular visual rhythms I seem to collect as photographs when out and about and so I thought it worth while putting them together as collections of patterns. I’ll leave you guessing what might also feature over the coming months but here’s the first: plaids.

Some are more obvious than others, and while you are looking, keep an eye out for the friendly robin. There’s a list of locations below for those who might be interested.

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1a Botanical Gardens, Birmingham
1b Plot 8, our allotment, Birmingham
1c University of Warwick car park

2a Aeneas Wilder, Mead Gallery, University of Warwick
2b Heeley Rd. Birmingham
2c Olympia, London

3a Newtonmore, Scotland
3b Hastings
3c Dudley Zoo

4a Hockey arena, London 2012
4b Dudley Zoo
4c Llanthony Priory, Wales

Looking up, looking down – X marks the YSP

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We had a fantastic time at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park en route north to friends this weekend catching the penultimate day of Mark Hearld’s show there. Its such a great venue and there’s always something to discover. We managed to walk some of the grounds and the weather was stunning for the time of year. One problem was the saturated ground, particularly on the slopes which had become rather slippery as a result of snow and rain over the last few weeks. (Three out of the four of us fell to the muddy ground – okay for toddlers, rather less stylish for fully-grown adults!)

While exploring the sculptures I noticed the cross being drawn in the sky, then looked down to the ground by my feet to notice the second made in the grass. With X, V & O letters featuring heavily in my current design collection it shouted out to me. X marked a really beautiful spot up there in Yorkshire.

http://www.ysp.co.uk

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Design inspirations 1: horizon lines

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For a while now I’ve been thinking about what has shaped my visual language and informed my art and design tastes. As a result I have planned a few blog entries in which I will evidence some of my thoughts in terms of influence and my art / design practice.

In some recent press interviews I’ve been asked about my inspiration and I tend to consider the formative years as pretty vital in this regard. It makes sense that we develop strong feelings and bonds to what we experience as children, either to reject them or embrace them – either way I believe those early years help to form our adult judgements.

Looking beyond the windows of the house in rural Norfolk where I was brought up is what I consider one of the greatest inspirations to my work. The open fields, the clear horizon lines and sparse distractions across the farmland of Norfolk have stayed with me in relation to my way of seeing, composition and economy of information in much of my work. Why draw ten lines when I can say it with one? I had a particularly horrid visiting tutor in the beginning of my training who felt that I was lazy in my designing, when actually it was he who struggled with some of the simplicity I was aiming for.

Looking back over some of the works I have made in the last fifteen years there are a few key pieces that explain that relationship with the horizon.

‘Nine Perspectives’, a linocut is made up of diagrams where I explore the land, sea and sky in a variety of ways. I consider the horizon in two-dimensional form, in plan view, elevations and diagrammatic perspectives in order to gain a sense of order.

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‘Meadows (France)’ is a drawing of a beautifully simple valley near Gourdon. It gave me a perfect view to explore further skewed interpretations of perspectives seen in the landscape. I worked with a sense of the view working round a set square, with two horizons, as I looked in front and to the side of me.

stgermain_webThe final image is from a screen printed artist’s book I made several years ago exploring the idea of ‘half full’ as a state of mind, but also from each side of the horizon line. I have used the blue areas as either half full of water (the Norfolk Broads specifically) or half full of sky above the chickens. The folded structure implies a view through the use of perspective, looking in to the distance or reflecting on oneself.

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These three works are very old as far as I’m concerned. I have new creative concerns now but they have helped me to test and explore principles in the way that I see and draw that have been important along the way.

lines in the snow

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I took these photographs on my way home from Birmingham yesterday and like the way they show the different interpretations of lines and stripes in the snow I recorded. My last blog post was about colour, and so I like the fact that it is almost absent this time around. I’m sure there can be some design inspiration from these.

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a colour survey of the plot

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Today was my first plot visit of the year and I set about digging over the strawberry patch – an important job given the lousy harvest of last year. I also took time to survey the rather heartless cabbages we have managed to grow and this inspired me to record the beautiful colours of the season from all round the plot. This reminded me of my Autumn survey some months ago, recorded on this blog. No doubt these colours will inspire my drawings and prints of the year to come. Sadly I didn’t get a picture of the robin who hopped about glad of the worms I uncovered but he made me smile all the same.

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