the beauty of earth

I am a land inspired artist living near the coast in North Somerset. I work with raw earth, mineral and botanical pigments for many reasons, primarily because they ground me, they make me feel deeply connected to the natural world and, secondly, because they are astonishingly beautiful.

Humans have been working with earth colours for hundreds of thousands of years. Every time I forage for colour I feel that timeless connection. Walking, observing, gathering earth, sieving earth, making paint and then painting, inspired by that same landscape, is a grounding, cyclical process.

The view across the estuary, the rock formations along the coast, the pebbles at my feet and the markings within those pebbles and rocks are my inspiration. They bring a sense of calm and deep connection to the rhythms of nature in an increasingly chaotic world.

Becoming a more ecologically aware, earth pigment artist has become an integral part of my practice: a quiet activism.

Every rock we touch is the emissary of timescales we cannot begin to comprehend without confronting our own transience, and yet radiating from it is also the quiet assurance that the world goes on and on, that we are part of something vast and magnificent, that beneath all the tumult and turmoil of our human lives there is a steadfast continuity that anchors life to eternity.

Maria Popova: The Marginalian