Dead Wood.

The dead wood series explores our concept of time in a simple manner, it was conceived three years after the pieces of dead wood came into my possession. I always intended to use them in work  but it is only recently that they have coincided with my practice. The wood always seemed to represented death and decay, but there is still something fascinating and expressive about them.

Working on bringing texture into my work, creating rocklike surfaces with paper linen and canvas, I sank the wood into the surface of the work, something once living becoming again part of the inert universal progression, on the surface of the rock is simulated simple lichen, a growth representative of the earliest for of life.

The time-span represented in pieces l to lV seems infinite rendering a single lifespan of man transient.  These four are painted in unsaturated colours, as the series developed I found I needed more intense colours to make two smaller pieces work (V & Vl), these colours included a considerable quantity of variegated greens, the meaning in these works seemed to change and alluded to the perpetual nature of mankind through rebirth and regeneration, and so these last two pieces were became ‘Dead Wood, the perpetual nature of man.’