Photo Etchings
Untitled Photo etchings, 2011 - 2017
I've always been a walker, even as a kid, me and my best mates, Janet and Judity Maiden (twins) would go on long walks, with no plan - just an open attitude and a sense of adventure. I've enjoyed walking ever since - whether in towns and cities or in the countryside - and I document the things I encounter along the way. I grew up in a small town in Cheshire in the northwest of England in a neighbourhood known as The Bluebell after the Bluebell Woods that existed back then, they were built over in the 1980s. Playing in those woods when I was a kid and seeing the huge swathes of bluebells that appeared every spring really inspired a life-long love of trees and other plants - and a sense that green spaces like those magical woods are fragile and ever under threat.
When I first started making drawings and etchings of trees back at Camden Workingmen's College, I soon had the thought that really trees draw themselves. Branches, stems and leaves growing outwards from the trunk and form intricate patterns of sharply defined graphite-like lines and softer charcoal clusters.
With this in mind, I like to regard the below tree images as photo-etchings made by me of self-portraits made by trees.
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(I stopped working with this process as I felt the materials and chemicals associated with it are unkind to the environment)
