2019-20 A Living Coast

an artwork celebrating NWT’s acquisition of land connecting the Cley and Salthouse marshes

 

…… In the Domesday Book of 1086, Salthouse is entered simply as ‘a house for the storing of salt.’  Long before this, salt was made by the then worldwide method of boiling sea water in clay vessels; Cley is Anglo-Saxon ‘claeg’ for clay.  It follows then that these two adjacent coastal settlements have connections going way back in time….

The clay (Cley) bowls of this work represent those bowls used historically to make the salt to be stored in the salt house

Heathwork 1997 – 2017

 

Curlew

bracken on birch  

The neighbouring heathland is a constant source of inspiration:

Heath Drawings

At the beginning of 2012, as at the end of every winter, parts of the heath overgrown with self sown nursery woodland shed their superfluous branches in the winds and weather, all helped along by the deer pushing their way through the crowded undergrowth.

(click on individual images for enlargement)

It is like an ephemeral, impermanent, constantly moving drawing, lines are going everywhere in all directions, evolving in to different shapes and forms. I couldn’t resist adding to them a little, but was careful to move nothing; the heath had spread its branches at my feet,   ‘tread softly …….  ‘

In the summer of 2014, these images were transported and transposed to Cley church in the Cley 14 exhibition:  ‘A Conversation with Materials’  – nature’s apparent chaos of the wild place constrained to the grid of the hessian, the restriction of the form, and presented as a work of art, on to a measured piece of canvas.

Bracken pieces

curlew-strip_web

Bracken Trail 2017

Changing seasons,

autumn:

and winter:

details:

                      

Heath Shadows II

Four Riders

Brush with Nature

Salthouse Heath houses many neolithic barrows.  Over enthusiastic felling of birch trees early in 2009 resulted in the making of this installation which consists of 31 pieces linking two barrows in the form of an avenue reminiscent of the ancient standing stones.

from the top of Three Farthing Hill (the 2nd largest round barrow in Norfolk)

and from the top of the 2nd barrow, more than 100 metres away

Spring 2009

brushwithnature3_web























and Winter 2010

brushwithnature5_web

                                     

www.heritage.norfolk.gov.uk NHER reference Nos. 6202, 6203

(see all work from these dates under  the heading ‘Heathwork’ on front page)

Salthouse Sculpture Trail

www.salthousetrail.co.uk

 

Garden Frames

Summer 2010

trail-10_web

 

 

 

Salt of the Earth

http://www.edp24.co.uk/going-out/salthouse-09-art-festival-1-712296

Summer 2009

 

 

                           

 

          

         

Burgh Apton Sculpture Trail