Two Easters ago I went for a walk along The Ridgeway, one of Britain’s oldest tracks running almost ninety miles from the stone-circle-enclosed village of Avebury in Wiltshire to the Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire. From this ancient route trodden by a patchwork of travellers, pilgrims, soldiers and drovers I saw a landscape being altered at pace. Fulfilment warehouses bigger than villages and silvery, snaking motorways wider than rivers. I saw the huge forces of an ultra-rapacious modernity coming to bear on our ancient landscapes, and by extension on our own spirits.

Before this walk I had been applying my own forces to painting, bringing work out of ideas or heaving them up from wells of feeling. Landscapes by will, combining seeing with memory to extend the reality of a known, actual place into some kind of myth. A song on the breeze.

The post-Ridgeway paintings are not quite the reverse, but closer to how landscapes actually are: fashioned by outside forces. Harsh or delicate but always resolutely formed and not conjured. Shortly after my walk I wrote that my response to the shock of seeing the stricken landscape should be to make work not simply find it. As such, the alchemy of time, attention and a more direct communion with the work are the threads that knits this body of paintings together. These works represent very clear pictures of inner states formed not so much by myth but by everyday forces of sorrow and joy.

Despite the Ridgeway origins, the views on show are taken from other places across the south of England. Whilst they pause to glance back over their shoulders, they are more determinedly located by a faith in the forces that shape the ever-unfolding present.

The large paintings in Ships in the Forest sprang to life out of a Pollock-Krasner grant received in August 2025. Katie Franklin Cohn at Maya Frodeman Gallery was instrumental in making my application a success and I am deeply grateful for her support.