My recent work is a response to a particular, unique environment  -  the beaches, moorland, and tiny islands surrounding the island of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides.

On the shore, lines drawn by successive waves leave prints of themselves behind on the sand and produce rhythmic lines. These create intervals - marking time.

The tide washes the surface of the beach , making marks and bringing and taking elements in a seemingly random and abstract way. There is always promise and loss. Yet, if we can depend on anything, we can depend on the fact that the tide will come in and go out twice a day, every day. In this repetition there is a security as well as an anxiety  -  a confrontation between mortality and immortality.

Like the tide, the repeated hand-drawn line is both random and structured.

My wall paintings are made with pigments and inks produced from materials gathered on the beach. Seaweed, rocks - quartz, feldspar and andesite - and charcoal made from driftwood.

Matter is transferred around the world all the time. People take it on their feet, or drop it with their litter. They travel and bring back souvenirs that crumble, get eaten and become part of someone or something else. Neil Armstrong probably left some earthly fragments on the moon  -  he certainly brought some lunar ones back. The Berlin Wall has reached the far corners of the earth, just as if it had been dismantled by an almighty explosion.

Flotsam arrives on the beach from distant places. It is beach-combed and given a new life or purpose, or it disintegrates. Molluscs and seaweeds grow on it, and it both changes, and becomes changed by, its new environment.

This is a metaphor for migration. As a result of human existence and action, D.N.A. has travelled and combined, making new , yet at the same time, retaining it’s unique characteristics. Our every action leaves something behind which becomes part of the future environment.

Man’s mark on nature leaves its indelible trace behind, but nature has a way of reclaiming its own  -  of creating and re-creating beauty - revealed in abstract images - encountered in unlikely places.

When places are abandoned, traces are left, yet the past is evident in what is missing as much as in what remains.  I am interested in what is revealed by the void space, what is spoken in the unspoken.

Remnants of buildings expose the spaces where lives were lived, blurred marks on the land testify to past labour. Songs and legends, told and retold, offer glimpses, that point to a greater story.