Growing up on the east coast of Yorkshire as a happy beachcomber, I was attracted to the faded painted wood, scraps of gaudy plastic, brightly coloured fishing floats and nets: all sun dried, sand blasted, salted and weathered. My Dad’s passion was sailing, each Friday we would pack up and spend the weekend on the coast. I would wander freely, exploring and collecting. To this day old boats, harbours, the sun-salty smell of tarpaulin and diesel, and the sound of halyards tapping on a mast are all comforting childhood memories. They have stayed with me and wherever I am in the world, I still naturally gravitate towards the harbour in any coastal town; collecting and collaging urban marks, motifs, textures and colours into my brimming sketchbooks.
Since the lockdowns of 2020-21, my work has moved in a new direction, one which develops and explores my subject with a joyful directness, clarity and freedom. The works in my new Salvage series have escaped the frame, flouted the rules and are bursting with mischievousness and rebellious attitude. As lockdown restrictions eased, I was free to wander to my favourite boatyards once again, and like a magpie I collected worn and painted ephemera. The weathered and once loved items, with their sense of human presence echoing the passing of time, caught my attention. I loved the joy and freedom in the accidental manmade marks made with little intention and left behind from a practical fixing. I relished this serendipitous mark-making and celebrated the glorification of the unappreciated! The marks themselves became my focus and what excited me was the physicality of the materials: the collaging, patching, sanding, sticking, and fixing of layers of paper, paint and wooden panels.
I reinvented and remade these fallen throwaways - my small treasures, my misshaped mishaps - into new stories. The act of layering, cutting, distressing, dissembling became integral to each composition’s character and personality. As I constructed and deconstructed, more stripped back dynamic compositions revealed themselves. Each piece became cheekier and more defiant; they jutted and spilt out of the frame: expanding shapes, stretching, reaching, teetering, balancing. The functional character of house paint, together with the creases, folds, wrinkles and many edges of paper delivered a new vocabulary of exciting shapes, edges and surfaces. They became punchier: each kink, curve and accidental blemish accentuated and celebrated in its own right. Flat colour abutted a dribbly paint stick. Multiple panels intersected and animated the work; small quirky groupings of irregular pieces engaged in vivid conversations with one another.
Far from being pretty and neat, the Salvage series is gobby and loud – the maverick in the corner! It represent an exciting new stage of my collage paintings that is rooted in my previous work. Acknowledging their roots in the gritty practical life of the boatyard, these pieces are boldly unconventional, surprising and playful.
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