inspired by seaweed
Art and Life:
Seaweeds and Silk
and Image-making
About the work
Materials and where they lead are pivotal in my image-making. I mainly use different papers, silk, paint, and soft rollers. They all combine to create images in which immaterial light is a determinant element.
Chance dictates a lot of what I do – in art and life. What inspires me depends on what I find: for my art, it’s on the beach where I like to unravel the knots of seaweed and detritus that the tide leaves behind because often there are algae I have not seen or worked with. And in life? Well, art is life.
I am inspired by Walt Whitman's 'Only by listening to the voice of the soul — a voice by definition nonconformist, rising above the din of convention and expectation ... do we become fully and happily ourselves. To be aware of ourselves is to hear that voice. To be content in ourselves is to listen to it.'
My primary focus is on seaweeds and their unique properties, habitats, and interrelationships.My Sony camera, an electron microscope, cyanotype or my phone microscope, and printmaking fashion what I present, and that is also influenced by Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, and Donna Haraway’s ideas on simpoiesis. Foucault opens up for me the idea of worlds within worlds, whereas Haraway helps me explore how I make with or become with those worlds and their components.
The capacity of cyanotypes to bring out the one-to-one size ratio of images to the algae that they present, and the watery effect of the silk on which they are printed always amaze me.
Through the silk and that ratio I hope that viewers will be more aware of the range and size of the many algae found on the south coast of Devon where I live.
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I have lived in South Devon for over thirty years and spent my working life teaching modern European languages to 11 – 18-year-olds in South Africa and Southwest England. While teaching, I read for an MA in Falmouth on the History of 20th Century Art, Architecture and Design which fired up my love for all things Art.
After retiring I studied Photography and was awarded a first-class honours degree in 2020 by the University for the Creative Arts. I am currently reading for an MA in Fine Arts at Plymouth University.
Born in Rome, Italy, I grew up in Malawi, Zimbabwe and South Africa where I started teaching. After having completed a first degree in History and French and a graduate diploma in teaching, I then went on to read English and Italian followed by a graduate diploma in translation.It was only after I had stopped teaching that I had the time to get to know the South Devon coast, its rich algal and geological diversity, and how little I knew about it all. Learning about them has opened up a new world, and, in combination with my photography, and more recently, fine art, a new way of expressing myself.