With the Trees New Trim

As a child my family holidays were often to the leafier parts of southern England. I have fond memories of taking a bus or train out of London and going walking through the mud of Devon, Cornwall and the Isle of Wright. Later, when I was at secondary school, we were taken on annual week-long study visits to the village of Peaslake in Surrey. At the time my school had exclusive access to a residential boarding house outside of the village. We called this place ‘Hurtwood’ and its grounds led out into that eponymous forested area. It was on these trips that I first learned how to map read, plan and navigate a hike and identify various flora and fauna. It was also when I first developed a love of drawing in response to the endless beauty of the Surrey Hills. I have an indelible memory of drawing the bark of a tree outside of the boarding house and of it being the first time I really ‘saw’ what was in front of me and not just what I ‘thought’ was in front of me. In those years I associated the countryside with my reading of Thomas Hardy and had a very romantic view of these places which were so emphatically not like London. Many years later, and by some bizarre twist of fate, I came to live and work in the same part of the world. I now walk constantly across the commons and hills of the region soaking up the atmosphere created by the seemingly infinite rows of pines, spruces and silver birches. I like to layer, scratch into .and distress these images of the local woodland as a way of marking my interactions with my environment and at the same time honouring the place that I can now call home. The titles of the pieces all come from lines of poetry by Thomas Hardy.