I have just re written my artist statement. Artist statements are important for 2 reasons – to clarify the work to the artist and to make the work accessible to everyone else by creating a curiosity about it without being prescriptive.

As an artist’s work evolves so should the statement. Which is why I have finally re written mine. I am interested in the same themes but I believe this is a truer version and acknowledges what I have always been interested in but not been able to vocalise adequately.

Anyway, here it is. For now.

I make art that explores the uncompromising cycle of life, the fragility of existence and the passing of time.

My studio is situated in a rural landscape where I regularly forage for materials to inspire and use in my work.

I have always been fascinated with animal bones and skulls, dead butterflies and insects, feathers, birds nests and dried seed heads, all of which I collect and display in my studio as my own ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’. These were also known as Wunderkammer and were first established in sixteenth century Europe. They comprised collections of objects that were displayed to give the viewer a sense of a world full of mystery and wonder, blurring the lines between myth and reality and allowing the viewer to come to their own conclusions. Something I aspire to.

My work often uses symbols associated with the traditional art genres of memento mori, vanitas and still life which are all associated with the transience of life and earthly pleasures and the ever present threat of death.

I use the cyanotype process to make most of my artwork as I love the fact that cyanotypes are created in partnership with nature allowing chance and the weather to collaborate in the process.

I aim to create work that is a poignant reminder of our own mortality and vulnerability as well as invoking a sense of awe and wonder.

Artists I admire include Cornelia Parker, Gabriel Orozco and Ori Gerscht. I love reading the books of Haruki Murakami. And the naturalist Chris Packham is also an inspiration.

A friend gave me this bird’s nest which had plastic woven through it – whilst it is a beautiful structure it is also a real sign of the times with our reliance on plastic and disposables impacting the natural world.

I am familiar with the photographs of seabirds that have died with stomachs full of plastic that they have eaten having mistaken it for food but I hadn’t been aware of how discarded plastic is affecting the lives of terrestrial birds.

The reasons for incorporating plastics in nest building may be due to easier accessibility if natural materials are not as available or plastics may look more inviting, either way it is a result of our irresponsibility in not disposing of them so as not to endanger wildlife.

Chicks can die if they get entangled in synthetic fibres that have been used by the adult birds to build their nests. The chicks get entangled and the plastic slowly strangles their limbs causing necrosis and subsequent amputations leading to slow and painful deaths.

Baler twine has been identified as a particular problem in agricultural areas and I often find it in fields and roadsides in my rural environment.

Another issue is that bright coloured plastics can potentially attract predators to the nest if it is located outside rather than eg nesting boxes.

And if this is what is happening to birds then we can be sure that other wildlife is being adversely affected too.

I am now starting to make art focusing on this important issue, hoping that I can in some way bring it to peoples attention.

Here’s a link to an interesting scientific article with much more information.

Every year alternative photography ask members to submit an image for consideration for their calendar and journal for the following year. The theme for 2026 was ‘A Tribute to John Herschel’.

John Herschel was a polymath: mathematics, chemistry and astronomy as well as photography were among his many interests.

Herschel invented the cyanotype photographic process in 1842. He was looking for a way to make copies of his writings.

(The cyanotype process was then pioneered by Anna Atkins who was the first person to publish a book with photographic images in 1853)

One of the many things he achived was the construction of a large telescope and with this he observed the night sky and documented nebulae (giant clouds of dust and gas in space) which have been instrumental in our subsequent understanding of the structure of the universe.

He was particularly interested in double stars of which he discovered and documented over 2,000 – these are pairs of stars that are gravitationally bound and orbiting together. They are important in astrophysics for studying stellar formation, stellar physics, and cosmology.

The constellation Cygnus has a very prominent bright double star (Albireo A and B) and can be seen in the Northern hemisphere in summer and autumn. It is so called becasue it resebles a flying swan.

For my tribute piece I used the cyanotype process to create an image that combined an image of a swan and of an armillary sphere.

Armillary spheres are mathematical instruments designed to demonstrate the movement of the celestial sphere with the earth at its centre.

I am delighted that my work has been selected for both the calendar and the journal.

I have recently returned from Paris where I visited a new exhibition about the work of Artemesia Gentileschi at Musee Jacquemart-Andre. I have been an admirer of her art for a long time and I was excited to see art that I was familiar with as well as some that I had never seen before.

If you are not familair with Artemesia Gentileschi here’s a few facts about her:

She was (1593 – c.1656) was an Italian Baroque painter. The paintings of this period were very theatrical and dramatic. As with the Renaissance artists, the Baroque artists worked for the court, the aristocracy and the church as its patrons. Artists of the period included Rubens, Caravaggio and Bernini. Women artists were uncommon and were not allowed to become members of the increasingly important and controlling art academies and so had to be taught by either their fathers or husbands. Her father, Orazio, was an artist, and realising her artistic talent taught her himself. He also employed an artist friend of his, Tassi, to teach her perspective. Tassi raped her when she was 17 and this has been pivotal to how her and her art has been interpreted. The rape trial brought her enormous notoriety, attention and speculation which both now and then often overshadows her actual painting achievements. Women artists usually painted still life and portraiture, which were considered the lower genres of art but Artemesia chose to depict the mythological and biblical themes and in the majority of her paintings a woman is the protagonist. She is unusual as she achieved international fame during her lifetime and made a living from her painting.

There are approximately 50 paintings in existence that are attributed to Artemesia and including the seminal Susanna and the Elders which is included in this exhibition.

The painting that intrigued me was Allegory of Inclination (1615-1617). I had never seen it before and it reminded me of the artworks created by the pre Raphaelite painters.

The Allegory of Inclination was one of fifteen canvases commissioned by Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger (to honour his great uncle, Michelangelo) for the ceiling in the Gallery Room in his home in Florence.

Artemesia painted (oil on canvas) a full size naked woman surrounded by white clouds, holding a compass and looking towards the north star, thought to be a reference to Galileo, who was now in her circle of associates.

However the painting as we see it today is not how Artemesia painted it because in 1684 the subsequent owner of the house considered the nudity offensive and asked another painter, Baldassare Franceschini, to paint drapery over the naked body.

In 2022 (400 years after it was created) Allegory of Inclination was taken down from the ceiling for restoration. The canvas was drooping, the colours had dulled and cracked and the varnish was yellowing. It was not until restoration began that it became apparent that it was impossible to physically remove the added drapery paint without damaging the work, so the painting had to be restored to incude the drapery.

In order to find out what the original painted by Artemsia looked like,  advanced diagnostic imaging techniques were used to create a digital replica of the original, with the drapery removed. The whole process took almost a year.

Below is a photograph of the digital replica comparing the original painting, the unrestored original painting with added drapery and the restored original painting with the drapery which is what you will see if you visit the exhibition.

And here is Allegory of Inclination restored and reframed in the Artemesia Heroine of Art exhibition.

This is the accomanying text translated into English.

Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, man of letters and great nephew of Michelangelo, is one of the most important protectors of Artemesia in Florence and his friend. She is pregnant and in a difficult economic situation when he entrusts her with this order, which concerns the decoration of a ceiling of his family palace. Allegory of Inclination, symbolizing Michelangelo’s natural propensity for art, takes the bold form of a naked woman whose features are those of Artemesia.The work is distinguished by its strong Caravesque naturalism. The compass pointing towards the polar star denotes Bounarroti’s links with science, and in particular with the astronomer Galileo. The restoration of the work in 2022-2023 revealed that originally, the figure was completely naked or dressed in a transparent veil, before being covered with a modesty brocade by the artist Baldassare Francheschini at the request of the heir of the sponsor.

Anya Gallaccio is an artist who works with organic materials such as flowers, fruit, sugar and ice to create (largely) impermanent artworks that change over time.

Preserve Beauty (1991) is one of my favourite pieces of her work. Several hundred red gerbera flowers are pressed and held behind a sheet of glass and left to gradually decompose.

Beauty is the name of this particular red gerbera that Gallaccio uses. Gerberas are a mass produced standardised commercial product and are the result of human intervention. Here they have been grown and then cut in their prime, at their most beautiful, and left to die.

This gradual process is seen over a period of weeks and questions our perception of beauty.

Preserve Beauty is reminiscent of the Dutch vanitas paintings of the 16^th and 17th centuries. Vanitas paintings which show objects that are symbolic of the brevity and transience of life and of the inevitability of death. They are seen as a meditation on decay, change and mortality.

Find out more about Anya Gallaccio

I was commissioned to make an artwork for Surreal Solihull, a public art project with Solihull Council in collaboration with public art consultant/curator Ruth Millington.

This is a bit about where I got my inspiration from as well as details of the brief and the exhibition.

The Brief

The artist’s brief was create new work in response to the theme of ‘Surreal’; to celebrate Solihull’s history of Surrealism, a 20th century cultural movement that challenged reality by exploring the unconscious mind and dreams.

Solihull was once home to one of Surrealism’s leading members, Emmy Bridgwater (1906 – 1999). During her successful career, she drew, painted and collaged strange, dreamlike landscapes of her mind. Birds, butterflies, mythological women, and wide eyes populate her symbolic pictures in which irrational images are juxtaposed. This same imagery can be found in her poetry, which she published in Surrealist magazines during her lifetime. She was also a proponent of automatic drawing.

Surrealism

Surrealism was a cultural and intellectual movement that flourished across Europe in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Founded in 1924 by the poet André Breton who defined Surrealism as:

“pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought.”

Surrealism reacted against the Enlightenment—the influential 18th-century intellectual movement that championed reason and individualism. Instead, Surrealism’s goal was to liberate thought, language, and human experience from the oppressive boundaries of rationalism and for artist, writers, poets and thinkers to explore the irrational, unconscious mind.

Having studied the psychoanalytical writings of Sigmund Freud, Breton was particularly interested in the idea that the unconscious mind—which produced dreams—was the source of artistic creativity; this became a key theme of many Surrealist artworks, writings and performances.

Contemporary artists continue to take inspiration from this radical art movement.

Read more about Surrealism.

 Emmy Bridgwater (1906-1999)

On 11 June 1936, the International Surrealist Exhibition opened in London. Visitors were amazed as Salvador Dalí delivered a lecture while wearing a full deep-sea diving suit. None was more impacted by this dramatic arrival of Surrealism in Britain than a 30-year-old artist and poet: Emma ‘Emmy’ Bridgwater who invoked the Surrealist principle of juxtaposing unusual objects to reveal uncanny narratives; in her paintings and ink drawings viewers are invited into interior worlds, defined by a symbolic language of birds, eggs and organic forms.

She experimented with automatic ink drawing as a means of accessing and expressing her subconscious. Impressed, Breton wrote in the 1940s: “Bridgwater brought a new purity of outlook to British Surrealism, returning to the early days of the movement, to its ‘automatic’ beginnings in France”. He invented her to Paris – to sign a Surrealist manifesto and exhibit her works in a major gallery show.

Read more about Emmy Bridgwater.

 My inspiration for When You Come This Way 2025. (Acrylic paint on board).

My artwork was inspired by Solihull’s coat of arms, blending symbols that represent both the urban and the rural, while connecting to Bridgwater’s love of birds. The ruff represents Shakespeare’s connection to the area and his plays that were set in rural locations but performed on urban stages: the goldfinch inhabits both gardens and woodlands : the hunting dog is now equally at home as a pet.

The Exhibition

 The outdoor exhibition Surreal Solihull will be on display in Solihull town centre until May 31^st 2025 and can be accessed at any time.

Find out about all 30 commissioned artists.

The Emmy Bridgwater Estate has endorsed the project and exhibition