I intend on building a new collection of work on the remote wild outpost of Jura an Island in the heart of the Inner Hebrides in Scotland. The Island covers an area of 142 square miles of raw beauty, seductive and treacherous landscapes, mountains, rivers and rugged shore lines with miles of beaches and cliffs jutting out into the Atlantic ocean.
The aim is to strike out and navigate both geographical and internal landscapes creating works as a response to the journey, using only what i find creating honest monuments in dramatic surroundings. The materials will mostly come from the sea, as I will comb the beaches for wood and drag and carry it to a site where it will be worked on cut, pegged and lashed together to form huge figures and forms. This will be incredibly labour intensive as I plan to create work all over the island, with a piece also being taken up to the top of one of the resident mountains.
Inspired and lured by childhood tales of the great adventurers spirit of endurance and overcoming hardships to find reward. Informed too by knowledge that the western isles are famous for a place of spiritual retreat. Not just for the celtic saints who came hear to hear the voice of god in the silence, but of poets and authors such as George Orwell who retreated here to attain space and quiet so he could lay out his visionary and prophetic novel '1984'.
This adventure is a calling, a test of endurance and an opportunity to use my creativity unbridled without the distractions of contemporary life. A way to present hardship and toil and exposure of emotion and fragility when devoured and sown into the power, majesty and great nothingness of the landscape. I will produce works that will take me out of what I have previously been creating and challenge and test me, turn me around 180 degrees and let me grow and be uncertain about it.
