So much has happened since I last blogged that I hardly know where to begin. What extraordinary times these are. I write almost one week since the UK government imposed significant restrictions on activity and travel in order to “flatten the curve” of Covid-19; albeit that those restrictions are less draconian than many other countries, for the moment at least.
I count myself fortunate to be an artist at this time and to have something that can deeply absorb and engage me in these times of quarantine. I’m doubly lucky that I have studio space of my own at home and that I am able to carry on at a time when my MFA course is essentially closed down and we are awaiting news about the fate of our planned Summer degree show, due to open in June.
But of course, despite being one of the lucky ones, I am still having to come to terms with limitations in travel, resources and materials. My plans to return to Anglesey to complete some of the site-specific work and to take photographs build my documentation etc. are postponed until October at the earliest. But it is what it is, and I must think about how I can adjust my practice to this strange new reality.
Sometimes in art, as with so many other things in life, when one door closes another door opens. In this case, digital editing can take me to places that I simply cannot physically go, coronavirus or no. I have begun to explore this new avenue as a means of further developing a set of drawings on sheets of suspended acetate that I am presently making.
The first of them has the working title “Network” (See right). It places the Amlwch railway line within a wider network of journeys, real or imagined, which I have scratched into the surface of the acetate with a rusty nail, as if I were preparing to make a drypoint print. I like the insubstantiality of the transparent acetate, and the way that it interacts strongly with light.
This scratched, reflective surface is my starting point. I often use Pixlr, a simple and free editing tool, as a means of improvising and exploring ideas, particularly in my illustration work, if I want to access abstraction, or if I just want to play around with images. (I strongly recommend it.) Using Pixlr here has, as always, given me some unexpected but very valuable results.
The first one (below) enables me to reference a sense of the deeper geology of the island of Anglesey, buried and unseen below the surface, and the journeys of people across it. In particular, it reminds me of a beautiful 1920s British Geological Survey map, a copy of which I own, which shows the complex geology of the island of Anglesey using a rich variety of colours. I’ve been struggling to formulate ways in which to interestingly reference this aspect of the island, until now.
The second image (below) gives a clearer sense of the scratched “journeys” that I have created on the surface of the acetate. I made these as a way of imagining different journeys: I think of a lady travelling from Llanerchymedd by train to visit her sister in Amlwch. I am thinking of my friend Walter Glyn Davies walking from his Amlwch home to the railway station to catch a train to Llangefni to have a piano lesson. I am thinking of a boy catching the train from Rhosgoch to Llangefni to go to school:
Here, I have also found a way to access the recurring idea of copper, which is becoming a key motif of my work around the Amlwch line. By photographing the acetate sheet outside where it reflects the beautiful blue skies we have been enjoying recently, I achieved the copper colour by making a negative image of the original, which pleases me greatly. The opposite of sky is “underground”, the source of copper and a reference to the copper mining history of Anglesey. It seems very fitting to me.
It may be that these images will find their way into my show. In any event, they represent a striking infusion of bold colour in a body of work that has largely been about line, so far for obvious reasons. I like the extra dimension that this work is bringing to the overall project, as well as enabling me to maintain a sense of exploration in my thinking whilst I remain physically stuck in one place. There are, after all, so many ways to travel in the imagination.