In 2020 I began a creative exchange with the late, extraordinarily great, Fiona Bennett. You can buy her poetry collection On the Brink of Touch here.
During this exchange we often spoke about Kei Miller’s extraordinary poem To Know Green from Green (published in the collection In Nearby Bushes). It seemed to thrum under my skin, to be bursting with life, a drum beat or heart beat as spring crescendoed. The poem isn’t really about spring but during lockdown, we walked and talked noticing verdant unfurlings in body, breath, wind, air, scent - separated only by a telephone.
The poem felt like a painting - a collection of paintings - waiting to be made. I wasn’t brave enough and I didn’t know how to begin to make the work in my head so I kept researching, drawing, gathering things that felt ‘like’ what I wanted to make. I continued painting, making work I have hated and painted over, or put away for months and then reviewed and painted over again.
And then began a collaborative conversation with artist Nicholas Cheeseman. We weren’t planning to do a show together, we stumbled across it whilst looking for venues for Free Painters and Sculptors 75th Anniversary show (next year). And suddenly we were knee deep talking about paint and planning Scratch and Scribble. So after quite a few years of being completely creatively stumped - something shifted. When I came across two other poems by James A Pearson (How to Listen and What Spring Does) some more space opened up and a route (or root) forwards emerged.
This work is part of an emerging series - T'o Know Green' - they are often characterised by green and grey, often on top of paintings I have destroyed by painting over and then carved into revealing excavated colour. They are gestural, and embrace splashes and drips, playing with the materiality of paint. As ever they are not specific places because I am in search of smell, sensation, memory, wind, rain and skin sense and these things sit only a little bit in image.
