Artist's Statement
I like to believe - and the signs are there - that art practice in Britain is undergoing a sea change, a move away from self-obsession towards a regained appreciation of what surrounds us: the astounding, if battered, beauty of nature. It is a Damascus moment, well expressed by Eliot: '... the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.' We wake up, we blink and find we are, after all, in paradise. It costs no money. The gates are open, we can all go in.
All of this is to say that I'm a landscape/seascape painter, devoutly abstracted, always have been, always will be. For my MA at KIAD (now ucreative) in Canterbury (2004-2005) I chose to do a project on the Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris), a conservationist journey which took me from North Devon (where I have my studio) to the remnants of the ancient Caledonian forest, now resurgent right across the Highlands, from Beinn Eighe, Glen Affric and Abernethy to the Black Wood of Rannoch. I used digitally reconstructed video and photography and for my MA Show, a mammoth pine installation. After that, I beat it back to paint and canvas.
I love space, can't get enough of it, and of course colour. The eight 'galleries' displayed here trace my work from the present time (gallery one) back to my first private show in London in 2003, just after I'd completed my BA at Winchester School of Art. Currently, I've noted a distinctly - and I might say, entirely unpremeditated - ghost of the patriot stealing into the images. This has nothing to do with nationalism, but simply love for the countryside, coastline and wildlife which makes the British Isles such an incomparable place to live in, and in my case, paint in. Another poet, when asked why he was going off to war, stooped down for a handful of earth and let it trickle through his fingers. 'Literally for this', he said. The life of Edward Thomas at the Front was to last barely a few hours. The fact that his country (and mine and, most likely, yours) is presently under threat on every side - ecologically, culturally and politically - seems to make this perception all the more urgent and in need of expression.
Emily Clark, October, 2006