‘Windsplatter inks and drawings’ (2020)

‘Windsplatter inks and drawings’
Solo exhibition
University of Chester, Kingsway Campus
March 2022

This exhibition was the first on of six occasions when I showed artwork and associated materials in connection to my practice-based research project at the University of Chester. The project lasted for six years and consisted of the development of a new visual arts practice in response to the landscape of Bakestonedale Moor, an exposed area in the Peak District (UK). The exhibition showed initial practical work including a video that showed how I worked outdoors.

The practical work on display consisted of several groups of photographs, drawings and a video. With this first exhibition of the project I had explored in which way I might make drawings in response to the landscape of Bakestonedale Moor and how using paper surfaces as ground covers could also act as sculptural additions to the land.
I showed a large ink drawing that I made on the slopes of Bakestonedale Moore, using four large paper panels pegged directly to the ground. I had made this large drawing in difficult weather conditions - with lots of wind - where the wind held part of the ink marks’ authorship. In a second sequence of work, I exhibited drawings on paper that I had made covering its surface with wax, oil and pencil textures…. reminiscent of the surface texture of a landscape. I added drawings of people to the such textured surfaces showing the person’s body shape surrounded or submerged in these wax, oil and pencil textures. The process of making these drawings and their outcomes made me think of the experience of the outdoor world as a sensorial and emotional event. I also showed illustrations made with pencils, and fine liners. These drawings showed a human person in the context of the stylised landscape of Bakestonedale Moor. This third group of drawings, shown in frames, aimed to visualise the felt experience of being outdoors, particularly the feelings for the felt connection between body and space, manifested as experiences of openness, expansion, or, their opposites, a closeness between sky and ground, distance and proximity and the strain felt in the body from carrying things or walking uphill.
I also showed several sequences of photographs. One of them captured the tactile particularity of surfaces that I encountered when working outdoors: stone and the skin of my hands, the sky or the prickly top layer of grass. In another sequence of photographs I documented how I had changed the landscape scenario on Bakestonedale Moor by placing paper surfaces, cut to shape on site, on the ground.