Dark Harbour

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These works developed from a disappointment. Hesitating too long, I failed to buy a print by William Black, entitled ‘Dark Harbour’. Working from memory, I set about trying to recreate the image, and to pursue it across a range of visual art media, printmaking in relief and intaglio, collage, drawing and sculpture. A pattern of motifs became established as a compositional structure, together with a field of verbal imaginings and allusions. It quickly became apparent that ‘Dark Harbour’ was creating more by its absence than by its still missed presence. ‘Dark Harbour’ is about wanting something that is not what I wanted it to be, about the space of disappointment and wanting, the compensations and comforts of loss, and the attraction and distrust of nostalgia. It is all the places I have felt comfortable of being wary of, and those places that I have felt wary of being comfortable with.

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At the back of my mind has been the relationship with home, particularly the difficulties attendant on revisiting the childhood home. Living within walking distance of where I was born and brought up carries the awareness of an inaccessible place, too far and too near.

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Looking at the project some time after it started, the relationship between shapes imply slippage and disconnection as well as echoes of forms already there in the photographs and postcards, maybe an attempt to grasp hold of and reinvent something which is always slipping away.

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