Vision Of An Estuary

A new series that explores the sensation of landscape using photography, drawing, painting and reliefs, juxtaposing
the works with strong visual relationships to open doors of perception
of seeing what the place is like and how it might have been.

I see it as a meditation, timeless, or even outside time, on the estuary where I live.

The fact is it’s no longer an estuary and the friary that once dominated it from the banks of
the river (then tidal and bustling with activity) is long gone.

But I continue to explore this place, digging over the visual references of past and present,
and mentally overlaying them upon each other.

And what I have found is that by juxtaposing different works of different types, both on the wall and in the albums,
I can produce something new that is bigger than the sum of its parts, that releases me... and them perhaps,
from the burden of defining things through the simplistic lens of time.

I hope therefore to have produced a series that is perhaps not so much
timeless but, let's say,‘tenseless’,
with all that might infer.

A thousand years ago a Carmalite friary was built on the estuary’s banks.
It would have been a busy commercial hub with strong links to two nearby
churches and the village just upstream.

Ships of reasonable size would have come and gone bringing all manner of life
to the broad expanse of water that at times must have been like a busy lagoon.

There still exists a ruin of the friary gatehouse but for the most part it is a set of
undulating banks in the grassy field. When it’s misty though, and at night, you can’t
see the normal delineations of the landscape and it becomes easier to
imagine what a landscape it might have been.

I have divided it all into 4 ‘realms’ as if you were moving down the estuary to the sea.

Upper
    The source and all its intricacy
Inner
    Where the human activity takes place
Wider
    Out into the water meadows
Outer
    The creeks and all things tidal