The Date Of A Story Stamped Onto A Tree

​​In the creation of some written languages, letters were inspired by the marks inscribed by flora and fauna into the landscape. Trails left behind by a bird walking, or an insect’s scuttling path. These journeys - abandoned imprints of a thing moving through space and time - became the backbone of making language permanent. When writing was in its infancy, before paper had come along to ease the spread of information, this language was inscribed back into the landscape, into stone and clay slabs. A fossil of a once floating story, set in stone.

 

During the first national lockdown in 2020 I started working with a lot of unusual materials foraged from around the house. Newspapers were some of the rare aspects of normal life that kept up production, so I began glueing layers of newspaper to canvas, building and growing everyday. Gradually shapes formed, shapes resembling fossils, shapes resembling the trails left behind by a thing moving through the landscape.