Sidney Nolan Trust residency, 2016

Initial ideas for the residency were to work on ideas of trees as growing sculptural forms, lifting small sculptures into the air as they grew, so that objects which may begin hanging off a small tree close to the ground are lifted over many years into the air and become an intrinsic part of the growing process of the tree. Also, to take a branch of a tree and burn it at high temperature to make charcoal which I would then use to make a life size drawing of the tree or use the charcoal to lay out as a life-size shadow of the tree.

Once I got to the Trust grounds, I became aware of crossing back and forwards between England and Wales and it opened another, longer time-scale way, of looking at the work I have been doing relating to borders, in countries of recent or present conflict. It stimulated ideas for a series of photographs on borders with glass letters reading ‘unmindful of bounds,’ relating to the Declaration of Human Rights. I took several images during the residency on the borders, especially on the bridge over the Hindwell Brook between England and Wales. Whilst spending the first days tracing the course of the river and reading about Sidney Nolan’s work I was drawn again to his Riverbend paintings, which had stirred me when I saw them in Sidney, Australia. I decided to make a series of ‘paintings’ using the clay from the Hindwell Brook bed, a river with which he had felt an affinity. I filled the gallery which he had used a studio with these clay paintings. I have continued this work with clay from River Avon.