“Black is not a colour, it is an absence of light”!?
My early art education taught me that ‘black’ is not a colour but an absence of light. While this may be true in certain contexts, and certainly true when colour mixing with primary colours, since working with earth pigments I have started to recognise colour as matter rather than simply light. How this affects our relationship with the world I’m not sure but it was certainly a revelation…
We have all been affected by the global Covid-19 pandemic. Whether this has been through changes to our lifestyle, our jobs and financial circumstances, our health (both physical and emotional), through loss (of loved ones or strangers) or to the highly visceral environmental ramifications “lockdown” has had, we have experienced something deeply transformational. This fourth body of work has been made as we have moved to a new but uncertain sense of security or ‘normality’. It has been painted and drawn using locally hand gathered and processed black Cornish (Botallack) and Devon (Bideford) earth pigments on a variety of salvaged, found and repurposed surfaces. The pieces represent intuitive conversations between myself, the materials and the contradictions of the ongoing global and local situation. This work was made during the second national ‘Coronavirus Lockdown’ in the UK.
