My work begins with time spent in the landscape: observing, listening and responding. Wind is the most constant presence there, and the hardest to hold. It shapes stone, dune and grass, carries sound and seed, and leaves only traces. Through sculpture, interventions in the land, photography and drawing, I try to register those traces, and to think about our relationship to the land and our responsibility for it.
Running through the work is nostos (νόστος), the Greek idea of homecoming at the heart of the Odyssey: the grief of returning, the hardship of the journey, and the bittersweet feeling of finally arriving. The landscapes I return to are bound up with the people who raised and shaped me. The work began on the tidal shores of the Isle of Skye. In the high desert grasslands of the Sonoran Desert, near to where my mother grew up, the work I made became a tribute to her after her death in 2020. It now continues among the coastal dunes and estuaries of northeastern Brazil, where I live alongside my own family. Beyond the landscape itself, I draw on classical literature, poetry and phenomenology.
My father’s death is what led me to become a visual artist, yet for years I found no way into that loss through the work itself. Becoming a father has given me one.
My next exhibition, Alecrim Dourado, takes its title from a Brazilian children’s song about golden rosemary that springs up wild in the field, unsown, and is treasured precisely for that: something special, even when its circumstances are ordinary.