Salt Water Shore

   Salt Water Shore as a focus has evolved out of the Heritage Shore body of work. I became riveted by the stories that were enshrined in some of the smaller exhibits in the collections of the cities museums.

    A realisation that the identity of a place could be formed by small historical artefacts as well as the grand buildings enabled me to juxtapose and rescale individual objects and place them against each other on the printed surface. In the Maritime Museum and the Slavery Museum it is humbling to understand the weight and significance of an eighteenth century coffle, for instance, but no less enlightening to consider the life of a pair of sugar nips of the same era. To ponder, while drawing and developing a printed artwork, how such a contrast of human habit could cast a dark and lightless blanket across the society that engaged in slavery or witnessed it.

    These observations sparked further imagery that fed my imagination and continues to produce visual clashes within each artwork that acknowledge the complacency and cruelty enmeshed in 'cultured' society at any time.