GREENING 

adventures & explorations of the colour green...... 2020 onwards

I am thrilled to bits to have received an Arts Council DYCP (developing your creative practice) grant in 2023 to develop an expanded, hybrid project that has been germinating in the undergrowth for some time.

‘Greening’ (working title) will explore what it is to become green, to be inside it, to embody it through personal explorations of gardening, walking, and landscape, alongside meanders into the colour green throughout art, nature, botany, philosophy, poetry, cultural history, music……

Throughout the year, I will be experimenting with what a hybrid arts and writing practice looks like through immersion in the colour green.  I will be sifting through the acres of notes, ideas, thoughts and research I have gathered over the previous couple of years to bring the project into some kind of shape and form. I will be having some mentoring to develop my writing, experimenting with making green inks and dyes from plants, printing with plants, and  reconnecting with 35mm film....... 

Posting progress + development on my Instagram 

#greening

Just before the world locked down, my beloved grandfather died. He was like a father to me, and my writing into green is intrinsically connected to him. We discovered a Polaroid camera in a drawer after he had passed, with a pack of unopened film; dateless, but likely ancient. With the new greens of May rapidly pursuing domination of my garden, today I got it out.

These are the results.

Sometimes green can’t be seen as green anymore.
It is shadowy and stripped of colour like memory.
Ghostly greens, unearthly.
Phantom.
Like the fading ink of the invoice that he wrote out for me for my 30th birthday framed on the wall.
Senescing as we all are and everything is.
Bound for the earth.