Distance and Proximity : Pages of Porcelain

The title for this solo exhibition is taken from Thomas A Clark’s collection of prose poems Distance and Proximity.  Alec Finlay in the preface writes, ‘The poems emerge from Clark’s daily practice of the short walk’ and that ‘Clark invites us to look at the world with attention’.  The practice of walking and of looking with intention, is how my own work begins.  In the section titled ‘In Praise of Walking’, Clark writes the following prose poems: 

Walking is the human way of getting about.

Always, everywhere, people have walked, veining the earth with paths, visible and invisible, symmetrical and meandering.

What I take with me, what I leave behind, are of less importance than what I discover along the way.

This exhibition explores ideas of walking through distance and proximity: some of the work exhibited is a result of long-distance walking, other work arises from more proximate walks; there are works made a few years distant in time, other works are made very recently; there are compositions which have accreted over time; and the exhibition draws upon landscapes observed from a distance, as well as environments that have been experienced close at hand.

As humans we communicate through stories, both directly told and experienced abstractly.  Distance and Proximity: Pages of Porcelain takes the more abstract path, but my work is always seeking to tell you a story about walking, a story about distance and proximity.