'Stratigraphy' - Winner - The 8th John Ruskin Prize 2026

'Stratigrapy' Sculpture - Submitted for the 8th John Ruskin Prize
"Patience in Looking, Truth in Making" - Winner 2026

Artwork Abstract:

This work is the result of long observation and experience of the Somerset levels and the flooded landscapes that surround our home. This is a landscape of layers, and the title refers to the laying down of sediments and materials in our wetlands as experienced now and in relation to a deeper sense of time, of things from our collective human past and earlier. I am working to tell a story with the components of these West Country flood lands, the rhyne water, reeds and peat that collectively define our experience of the landscape, hoping to capture something of the auratic quality of our engagement. The cabinet form acts as a museum frame and is underpinned by an ethical fieldwork collection methodology and the sustainably retrieved elements are then manipulated and assembled in the studio. The bones carefully arranged here are of mice, shrews and voles, periodically flooded out of their burrows by the shifting water levels, and are the prey species of the tawny and barn owls that hunt over the levels. The assembly of the collected bones, from found owl pellets, are arranged under a reedbed skyline referencing the often-unseen non-human lives that are lived out around us.

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