VISIONS, DREAMS AND METAPHORS

My work has always been driven more by vision than ideas. Although ideas support the making of the work and the technical and physical limitations of material and process: This technical facility informs and supports the work - it is not the work.
 
The themes and intentions that determine my work are the same as they have always been.  Now however, the outcomes are different. 
 
These small drawings have been culled from a body of work made over a six year period.  These images represent a personal mythology, created around a language of understanding the world I live in:  It is my history as I have lived it. These events, experiences and stories shape my perception of the word I find myself in and in turn how I evolve and navigate within this world. 
 
Briefly - at the root it all - are the usual curiosities.  For me, this would be: The transformative power of; faith, hope, compassion, rage, discovery, secrecy, fear, courage. The loss of innocence. Love and the end of love. Death and longing. Solitude and contentment.  God. The book. Great and everyday and ordinary miracles. The word, the voice, the spoken and in song. Stories that bind and separate people, generations, cultures and the different understanding of these by everyone. Then bound to this is my knowledge and experience of the world.  There is my childhood, the family, my family.  Stories. The body. The sea. The garden. 
 
Images that come from that stramash are not premeditated, I begin to draw and the image gradually makes itself known. To make the story legible and meaningful for me, I draw upon the many many influences that run alongside my compulsive curiosity: These determine the visual form and often how the whole story evolves.  All of this is an intuitive process; of improvising and adjusting, controlling and discarding; I make it up as I go along. In turn the process of making the images, of telling stories through pictures, can often provide an insight into what and why and where to go next:  Then the same again. 
 
What is in these books is the world as it appears to me.
 
None of this is new or different or original - except that it is mine - such as it is.