I work with what remains.
Resonant Ground is a body of paintings rooted in my response to the Black Country landscape — a place shaped by geology, extraction, industry and generations of human labour.
The Black Country UNESCO Global Geopark holds layers of history beneath its surface: coal, limestone, clay and ironstone; quarries and workings; waterways and altered ground. What appears on the surface as woodland, water or open land can carry the traces of what came before.
I am drawn to these places where the visible and invisible meet.
Water fills abandoned workings. Roots enter disturbed ground. Vegetation pushes through the remains of industry. Nature slowly reclaims what has been altered, but it does not erase it.
My paintings begin from this tension between damage and regeneration.
I do not paint the landscape as a fixed view. I work through abstraction, allowing fragments of trees, roots, water, geological forms and human intervention to emerge and dissolve. Layers are built, scraped back, stained and disrupted. The surface becomes a kind of terrain — holding traces of what has been buried, exposed and transformed.
The paintings are concerned with memory, but not memory as nostalgia.
They are about the physical memory held within place.
The weight of the ground.
The movement of water.
The presence of what is no longer visible.
The persistence of what remains.
Resonant Ground is my attempt to respond to a landscape that has been profoundly shaped by human hands and continues to change beyond our control.
The paintings ask us to slow down and look beneath the surface.
What does the ground remember?
What remains when everything has changed?
WHAT’S NEXT
The paintings are a beginning.
I want to move beyond the surface and listen to what the landscape might still hold. Through film and sound recording, I will explore its vibrations — water, stone, machinery, bodies, silence, and the voices of those connected to it. This will allow the work to move from looking to listening, from the painted surface into a more immersive experience of place. This evolving research will become the foundation for The Living Ground, where landscape, memory and human experience begin to meet.