I have been working on a series of Earth Light Paintings to process and reflect the experience of living through Earth Crisis. In late 2022, I attended a 6 week Active Hope course, during this time a report announced that 70% of biodiversity has been lost since the 1970s and the COP27 conference happened in Egypt. I’ve been creating these photographic paintings as a way to work through feelings of eco-grief. The works also incorporate the pieces I made during my Slow Ways commission in January 2023, during which I walked the Gorleston-on-sea to Lowestoft coast, and made a trio of artworks using found materials about the eroding cliff edge. During half-term in February 2023, a selection of these prints were exhibited in Sea Palling along the North Norfolk coast, in a window exhibition space curated by Alison Holden-Standley
They were made using soil, compost (digested from my household waste), wax, beach-combed chalk, sea and river water, eroded cliff sand, charcoal, left-over Cyanotype photographic chemical and sunlight, onto A2 cartridge paper
I’m interested in exploring disrupted rhythms at this time of Earth Crisis. I’m also considering boundaries and tipping points of myself, as a community artist working in my home-town, as what it means to work in a ‘giving’ role. The forms and sweeping painterly lines are my expression of bulging out, overshot resources, a splintering of life systems and a disrupted flow
