acrylic and oil on canvas, 2025, 80 x 60 cm.

From my kitchen window, February, pre-dusk. The sky is often magical at this time of day looking north west ish or due north.

oil and acrylic on collaged cradled wood panel, 2025, 61 x 61 cm

and here we are in winter, early this year, on a fine blowy day, getting lots of dog blankets washed and dry, and the garden is very dormant.

oil on collaged wood panel, 61 x 61 cm, 2025

A painting of asters and of a cone flower in my prairie garden, the Glade Coneflower which is something of a rarity in its native Kentucky , and it’s quite difficult to grow from seed.

loose pigment, sand and shell in oil paint over acrylic layers on canvas collaged with paper and fine linen, 100 x 100 cm

part of a new body of work I am making about Tentsmuir and Kinshaldy beach where I walk my dog once or twice a week, based on a poem I wrote almost 2 years ago (published in Tears in the Fence Literary journal Spring 2023). The text on the painting comes from this poem, which starts like this –

here at tentsmuir

there is only the hackle of a hole where the wind blows never a gap in the horizontal
the sea-eagle passes
overhead exchanging beaches forging a faraway helicopter coming
and going
and your holy human heart in your breast widens the sky
holds it in your hand to touch the marrams

text around the edges too, hand written in pencil

painted along the top

I take a pocket-sized sketchbook with me on walks to make quick drawings in, and from these and from notes taken with my iphone camera, a new set of paintings both small and very large is coming into existence. I am experimenting with mixing sand and shell fragments from the beach into the paint, or sprinkling it over the wet paint, to bring the materiality of place into the paintings. I want to explore the idea of belonging and spiritual release through the experience of nature in that mix of paint and the material of the land in my work.

loose pigment, sand and shell in oil paint over acrylic layers on canvas, 71 x 71 cm

This alder tree was uprooted from its river bank during a storm in early autumn 2024, somewhere in the Tay’s catchment and brought down river and estuary to end up on Kinshaldy beach.

One of the voices in my poem.

mothering in losses shifting my traces my walls my life
a threshold shaken and leaving this thin coating I am self I am votive
evading all even the deepest sleep of this place