MARY

As with many people the act of mark making began at a very early age as did my walking. In recent years the two actions of mark-making and walking have converged. I walk every day, over 2000 miles a year.

In Britain most of our landscape has been changed by the action of humans. It is in this mediated landscape that I work/walk. I prefer solitude and have a huge capacity for focus and pattern finding which is a reflection of my neurodiversity.

I am obsessed with finding ways to map my environment, to articulate the space I move through. My body draws an invisible line through the space in which I walk, I feel the ground under my feet, my dogs nose on my hand, the air on my face, I smell the sheep, I hear the skylark, the rustle of the gorse.

“Walking faces us with many landscapes: there is the landscape outside of us, and the landscape inside of us.” Ernesto Pujol, ‘Walking Art Practice: Reflections on Socially Engaged Paths’, 2018, p. 329, Triarchy Press, England.

My drawing is a 3D representation of the Winter’s progress towards the solstice, to gradually increasing light, growth and colour. My work is a combination of observation, sensation and invention in order to create a language to describe - the invisible made visible.

The imagery I make is often a mixture of memory, drawn or photographed features, to a source of something more tangible and real; a snail shell, old corrugated iron, flaking paint, wool hanging off a bush. However my drawing, my art, goes beyond the linear rendition of objects. I produce visual forms of concepts, emotions and temporal space.

As a conceptual artist, I draw from my own direct experiences, repeated, layered and shaken, like a Winter snow globe in an attempt to capture the atmosphere of a remembered event or situation and the intensity of feeling around it.