'Stratigraphy' Sculpture.

Stratigraphy – The title refers to the laying down of sediments and the depth related chronological ordering of finds as is used archaeology. I am interested here in our wetland landscape as experienced now and in relation also to a deeper sense of time, of things from our collective human past and earlier. I am working 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, as used in museums and dioramas, is familiar to many of us and here acts as a frame to contain, and to allow us to consider the layering of time and place. My work methodologies are by their iterative nature always shifting and through multiple drawings and test assembly decisions are made about composition and placement. My work is also underpinned by an ethical fieldwork collection methodology and the sustainably retrieved elements are then manipulated and assembled in the studio. The bones of mice and voles, periodically flooded out of their burrows in the shifting wetland landscape, are the prey species of the tawny and barn owls that hunt over the levels. The assembly of the collected bones, all retrieved from found owl pellets, are arranged here under a leaden sky, referencing the often-unseen non-human lives that are lived out around us.

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