Ghostwood is my response to place and experience, the cornerstone of my creative practice. The work aims to capture some sense of my experience of place; the old woodshed, the tranquil meadow, planted with new trees, surrounded by aged woodland, full of cut timber, with tree branches reaching down over the tin roof scratching and swaying gently.

The work hopes to make comment to the value of trees, and the failure of humanity to respect their vital role in maintaining balance for this fragile world. I am thinking of habitat, protection, shade, oxygen aswel as beauty. By using trees as a disposable resource, mankind is destroying ancient established woodland, habitat and forest across the world without no care to the irreversible damage caused.

The painted canvas presents a monochrome, ghostly x-ray image of the forest wall, vertically dropping to the floor. The painting hangs vertically in contrast to the horizontal, severed birch trunk with its silvered bark: still, immensely solid and heavy, felled and dead, though wrapped in beautiful silvered bark so tactile and textured.

The work is informed by research for my dissertation, focusing on the Sea paintings of Jessica Warboys and John Virtue. Jessica Warboys’ Sea canvas paintings are made on the beach, with the sea as her co-worker, to make ‘records’ of the moment. This resonates with my practice of working outdoors with canvas with the wind as my co-worker. John Virtue’s huge paintings, always in monochrome, are his response to place and experience, his perpetual walks and annotations of the ever changing moment – his vision of the world.