Craobh

Craobh is an old Irish word for tree. Trees have inspired me in the aging process. The older I get the more I appreciate big old trees.

This work reflects my inspiration in the counselling relationship as well as challenging notions about Romantic landscape. What makes the work contemporary is the way it fuses those same concerns with a “cinematic” visual style, a kind of pictorial drama that uses light itself as a performative element. Trying to bring the preoccupations of Romanticism into a contemporary relevance I use one of the most primitive archetypes in human culture: the forest, which is a place apart, a place of searching and confrontation, home to all those barbarous realities that go unseen in civilised discourse, that shadow world of human society, where boundaries are erased and even firm certainties obscured. This is a place of dreaming and on a primeval level of cultural memory the forest is something like those unmarked areas of old maps – what is beyond the limit of familiar experience cannot be directly pictured, but is, at the same time, the substance of that other world. To go beyond the map’s edge was to go beyond the safety of what was known, to enter uncharted territory.