While two hands still available

I've been working with two artist friends, Pauline Lerry and Lesley Roberts for several years, meeting together to draw, ponder and explore different topics. Sometimes we chat and sometimes we just concentrate, sometimes we eat cake and drink coffee. Although we all have our own studio spaces in our own homes, the 'coming together' from time to time in a local church hall seems to give us a special bonding atmosphere of mutual creative thinking. 

This working relationship led us to arrange a common project which I've described earlier in this blog based on a study of the newly formed local wildlife and wetlands area on the north Somerset coast at Steart Marshes. We called the exhibition that evolved from this 'Change'.

To continue the idea of working together, a second exhibition topic was discussed based on environmental issues. All three of us wanted to respond to individual aspects of this vast topic. Pauline decided to look at the changing of sea levels; Lesley to look at the disappearing wild flower meadows and I to look at ideas based on the pollution of plastic on our coastline.

So making a start on my own topic, I started to look around for to see where and what sort of plastic items were being discarded on our beaches.

                     


My foraging during last summer and into the winter seemed to produce mainly plastic bottles amongst pebbles and sea grasses in the coastal stretches I visited initially.I had many plastic containers at home too as well as plastic carrier bags I was re-using. An unattractive and unpleasant collection which wasn't at all inspiring, so a lot of thinking needed to be done to come to terms with how I should approach this topic.

This project is in response to the destructive deluge of waste plastic, particularly in the sea and particularly for wildlife.This is a fresh project although part of an on-going passion for conservation, an underlying theme for most of my work in recent years. 

I am filtering ideas to select a particular 'angle' for my research into a new material for me - plastics. I plan to focus on the discarded plastic bottle and its impact on the ea and coastline, and the plight of birds and fish.

I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading rather than my usual approach to jumping straight in to play with materials that then inform and help to develop ideas. Perhaps my difficulty in handling materials due to the broken wrist gave me an ideal opportunity to hesitate and ponder more deeply. The knack of noticing and absorbing small detail feels the right way to make progress within a personal landscape of thinking in which it feels I am able to fit comfortably.

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