Drawing

My work changed over the years, from a lyrical, non-topographical approach to the natural processes that form landscape; through work focused more specifically on the effects of agriculture on the land, in England, Ireland and other parts of the world where I had travelled; to a more recent strand of work based on the appearance, meaning and uses of maps, in which I found a way as a painter to express my fears and hopes, environmental, philosophical and political, about our world, past, future and present.

I was drawn initially to the Aran Islands by reading Synge, and by seeing aerial photos of the maze of walled fields, hand- made over generations on top of the islands’ limestone. It seemed to me among the world’s most ‘heroic’ places to farm, and during many visits I developed a method of using (my own home-made) charcoal, to try to convey the function, beauty and intricacy of that landscape and to celebrate what could be seen as an extraordinary, anonymous collective art work taking centuries of the islanders’ labour to create.