Ink, pencil, graphite, crayon, pastel and biro

127 x 66 cm POA

My childhood experience on the “Inland sea, Anglesey” provides the starting point and backdrop of the “Origins Irish sea map” series of drawings.

The Irish Sea and the series called “The Origins of the Irish Sea” emerge from long-term obsession and pre-occupation with this stretch of sea and beyond. For me, the Irish Sea personifies the sense of being in the Northern Hemisphere. It is a romantic symbol for me and has provided me with a limitless visual language in my paintings and drawings for over twenty five years. The open space it provides allow a pictorial freedom to explore notions of emotional thought, colour which indeed eventually become tapestries of different ideas in the format of a map of sort.

The “mapping” of emotional thought conceived through the language of drawing, layer upon layer of mark-making, surface pre-occupation, pattern, shape, structure, space and tonal charting my relationship with drawing process and practise relating to this stretch of sea.

Some “Map-drawings” have notes to accompany them, thoughts and ideas documented along the journey of their creation.

The drawing/maps contain ideas around Navigation, Sea-depths, Hydrographical sea charts, Ocean’s Platonic’s, climate change, Geology, Geography, land-mass, time, tide, the magic and mystery of the sea.

Each map is methodically worked over long periods of time, historical maps provide an interesting “grounds” or starting point for this visual exploration. Each drawing develops its own direction and character over time through an intuitive, considered process. The finished work hopefully has a pictorial invention and has an independence from this initial starting point.

Each “map-drawing” becomes in-turn a visual voyage of sort.

“The act of drawing for me is still an activity which offers and suggests infinite possibilities to the individual… I am drawn and influenced by artists who embrace this medium of exploration and have embraced a dialogue between “subject” and “surface”.

Each drawing is a site for an imaginative engagement with a subject or theme, from my daily sketchbooks to major drawings.

For me, they are imbued with mystery but connect deeply with my intrigue, curiosity and emotional landscape of where I live, the sea, coastline, estuary and river and how I perceive my relationship with them through visual means.

What's on

What's on

Kyffin Williams Drawing Prize 2021