I work with what remains.
In the Black Country, layers of rock, industry, and movement sit just beneath the surface. Quarries fill with water. Canals cut through ground shaped by labour. Vegetation returns, slowly undoing what was forced into place. We sit within the Black Country UNESCO Global Geopark where the minerals on our doorstep and the geology beneath our feet helped shape the industrial revolution and the world.
Using expired 16mm film, hand processed. I allow the image to break down—light leaks, chemical traces, stains, fragments that refuse to settle. These are not errors but evidence. The landscape behaves in the same way: unstable, shifting, unresolved. Sound enters as vibration. Contact microphones pressed to stone. Hydrophones submerged in canal water. What is recorded is not always heard in the usual sense, but felt—resonance held within material. Collecting mud and rock to create pigments from the banks of polluted rivers, canals and pools, these I use to create paint. Paintings layered and scratched, excavated like the land creating a strata pooled and eroded.
The work moves between what is visible and what is sensed, between surface and depth. It resists fixed viewpoints, asking instead for time, for attention. Light and the natural circadian rhythm plays with the translucent surfaces. This is not an empty landscape. It holds voices from the shadows—histories of labour, migration, and lived experience that continue to shape the ground beneath our feet. They do not announce themselves directly, but remain present, embedded, carried.
I am interested in what emerges when we begin to look and listen.
The work has been described as “visceral, elemental, and spiritual, provoking reflection on internal landscapes, memory, and the human impact on the environment.” Audience responses indicate that the installation successfully “encourages contemplation of the relationship between natural cycles, industrial histories, and environmental regeneration.”
This has spurred me on to investigate much deeper into the layering of the local geography and our multicultural society.
