Less Space in the Studio

Another New Studio

In the book ‘The Garden Against Time’ Olivia Laing writes about the restoration of a garden, delving into its history and the forces around it that shape that history. She writes

“ …I was exhausted by the perpetual, agonised now of the news. I didn’t just want to journey backwards through the centuries. I wanted to move into a different understanding of time: the kind of time that moves in spirals or cycles, pulsing between rot and fertility, light and darkness. I had an inkling even then that the gardener is initiated into a different understanding of time, which might also have a bearing on how to preclude the apocalypse we seem bent on careering into. I wanted to dig down, and see what I could find. A garden contains secrets, we all know that, buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world.”

It is a fascinating book drawing on notions of the garden from Milton’s Paradise through John Clare and the ravages of enclosure and even to Iris Origo’s war diary from la Foce, ‘War in Val d’Orcia’ with all the diversions you would imagine and never shirking the moral ambiguity at the heart of all interactions with the land.

That idea of connecting to everything through a seemingly solitary activity is exactly what I’m trying to achieve with ‘woolgathering’

tree one 16 12 24

So in December I made one more big drawing of the flower beds and worked on the VR world, firstly refining the ground so that the lawn is flat and then working on the jumps between the life size and micro views that will lead into the other worlds before finally putting in the background from Google Maps to place the garden in a bigger environment.

This is the environment before i adjusted the lawn.

This one has the new lawn

and this one has the surrounding environment.

Obviously alongside this I needed something to put my energy into when the VR becomes too frustrating so I started some drawings of trees after seeing a photograph by a friend.

As well as the one above the videos I made two other small ones.

tree two 16 12 24

tree three 16 12 24

Before these the big ‘woolgathering flowerbed’ drawing was done over two days in the studio and is around 130 x 110 cm, pastel on cartridge paper.

Woolgathering Flowerbed

I made a process gif over the two days the drawing took.

woolgathering flowerbed process

Meaning I have even less space in the studio

Even less space in the studio

I started a big drawing of the trees on the 3^rd January and also a couple of paintings based on the flower drawings while I was downloading an environment maker for Blender so that I can add a meadow to ‘woolgathering’ after John Clare’s ‘Helpstone Green’

tree four 03 01 2025 in progress

Flowers Painting 03012025

Flowers Painting 03012025

Both these are c. 50 x 50 cm

Drawing

I’ve continued to draw every day;

The December drawings can be seen here

…and the November images here

There is a link to the previous month’s Gallery on each page.

The drawings are posted to  Instagram each day.