This is a large oil painting on linen from a series titled Ash Project - documenting and celebrating our native ash tree, Fraxinus excelsior.

Ash Project Statement 2021

 Ash – Dancer In The Wind  is a series which began as documentation when I started watching and regularly drawing a particular ash tree from my studio window. I had become visually aware of the devastating effect of ash dieback on our native ash trees  and wanted to document and bring awareness to the plight of our country’s important native tree. 

Common Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) is found across Europe, from the Arctic Circle to Turkey. It makes up one sixth of our main hedgerow trees; losing them will affect our landscape dramatically. Culturally, it also provides an important material.

I like to call ash the ‘dancing tree’, it’s boughs upturned at the ends, swaying and moving with the wind. These kinds of observations help to inform my practice which is not just about visual representation but also about a process of transformation – of experience, self and material. For me, painting is as much about the materiality of paint as the the act of painting and drawing - where the physical act of making work is, in part, an ontological process. I believe that painting has the potential to be a transformational, that nature and landscape can be a metaphor for human experience and that nature can give us moments of poetry.

In as much as some elements of this work are about an awareness of the decline of the ash tree, it is also about the spirit of it, ‘the dancer in the wind’.

The work is framed with a simple white painted wooden band.

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