A Fine Balance

‘Salt and other stories’ (2024/5) is a series of photographs and textile works all developed during or in response to time spent as an artist in residence at Torre Abbey in 2024.

All of the works were created with a major theme of Torre Abbey’s restoration in mind. I was fascinated to learn about the challenges Torre Abbey faces due to its proximity to the sea and how the salt air erodes the plaster. I was interested in this particularly because salt is often used as a preservative in my artwork whether through fixing photographs as the final step or in the process of creating natural dyes to colour textiles. I wanted to play with the concept of erosion and preservation as a theme.

I was drawn to the beautiful gardens at Torre Abbey and the abundance of flowers while I was there on residency. I wanted to capture them with my cameras as each day and each week that I spent there, more of the flowers came and went. Having experienced a significant bereavement recently, grief and loss is ever present in my work. Working with the garden at Torre Abbey was a visual reminder of change, of new life, death and decay.

My photographic method is unusual because I don't use traditional chemicals to develop my photographs. I collect plant matter from the area I am photographing and use this along with some natural ingredients to create a site specific developer. This is a hugely important part of my process as it allows the place I am photographing to make its mark on the images I am producing. No two developing solutions are the same and because of this some of the control of what the images will look like is taken away from me. The process becomes unique to the plants I am photographing and the strength of the developing solution that I have created from them.

The textile works that I have created for the exhibition are a response to the drawings, paintings and photographic studies I made of the garden while I was there. I have created these pieces in my studio over the winter and it has brought me great joy to be reminded of the beauty and colour that I experienced in my time in the gardens.

The textile pieces are informed by my photographs and yet are boldly different in their aesthetic. They compliment each other, boundless colour and joy so obvious in some of the pieces and calmer more sombre and reflective scenes in others. In this way the art that I have created for this exhibition reflects my initial theme strongly and acknowledges that two things can be true at once. We cannot have life without death, we cannot have beauty without the inevitable knowledge that at some point there will also be decay. In the same way that I use salt in my work to preserve it for the future, it also acts as a destructive force in other ways. Seeing my work altogether reminds me that there is always balance.