Poached Earth
An area of poached earth in the field beside my house has been an abundant source of inspiration. The result of cattle trampling the ground during wet weather then becoming hardened in the summer's heat wave creating an extraordinary and obscure landscape.
The Boyle Family's 'Earth Series' of three dimensional casts of the ground has shown that 'there is nothing that cannot be the subject of an artwork'. Exploring ideas of preservation, regeneration and degeneration I shrouded areas of the degraded surface and in so doing made 'casts' in order to capture the shapes and volumes.
Photographic images were then used to make composite artworks, often using stitch to reference scarring and repairing of the environment. The resulting artworks question the real, the replicated and the re-interpreted.
