Inspiration

As a child in the 1960s, I remember walking to school through derelict streets and playing in long-deserted slum dwellings and gardens, in the lee of the South Downs. These areas were gradually re-built and re-purposed into light industrial estates close to the harbour and the shingle beach where we spent our summers. The memories of these places never left me; the coastal downland ‘edgelands’, overgrown with weeds and wildflowers, the flint and chalk beaches and cliffs, the ever-present cry of gulls wheeling over the beach, the tang of salt in the air. These things inevitably come out in my work in one way or another; the long-gone and overlooked places where the edges of my memory cross over and move through into the present moment.