Coffee. Runes. Ever-increasing darkness. This fuelled my creative experience at NES, along with much more. I am based in the UK and my work is mainly paintings and drawings. My practice is always a conversation between my surroundings, myself, ideas, symbols, mark making and a bit of “I don’t know”. My work deals with our relationship with “certainties” and the fact that they rely wholly on an individual’s placement in time and space psychologically and their awareness of where they actually are. We are all moving parts and I hope to create something where the viewer and the work meet, for just a moment, on common ground.
My series of 23 bind rune paintings were inspired by the affiliation Iceland has with Norse culture. They are old symbols and hold great meaning. But I wanted to revitalise how I and others might see them by using neon colours. These vibrant colours can be found in the slow rise and fall of the sunrises and sunsets here in winter. Using coffee as a wash and matte medium as a resist, the runes emerged and seemed to want to play. I wanted to show the runes as multidimensional objects by marrying how they are written with how they might be experienced, using the associations and meaning behind them as inspiration.