Grey Dead Concrete

Focussing here on a Red Deadnettle plant pushing through a concrete track I wanted to reflect upon my changing relationship with the landscapes around my home in Rye, East Sussex. I spent the first 5 years here walking all of the footpaths and learning how to navigate hundreds of miles of tracks so that I could walk them on autopilot, without reference to a map. My goal was to embed a sense of home. That worked perfectly but when the first national lockdowns started in 2020 I began to realise that I no longer needed to heed my directions, or to think about the tangled relationships between the villages orbiting Rye. I could head out for many hours on autopilot and that meant that I had a freer head. I now had the capability to observe more of the flora and fauna on my walks. Inexorably, in the middle of the pandemic, I started to recognise just how much food there was all around me. I started to feel much more a part of and a product of the land than ever before because I felt networked into it, really for the first time. The past two years has fundamentally changed how I see the world and my potential place in it, and this is an overwhelmingly positive shift. In many ways this drawing is an expression of finding beauty and interconnectedness despite all the oppressive odds of the concrete or the pandemic. Although that theme is a major thread of the Disintegration Series this piece is a parallel development in my thinking, bringing atomisation and blurred physical boundaries into line with the fact that the world’s other organisms are often extremely benign and supportive. Or rather, it lets me feel that the indifferent universe can be perceived less harshly than I might have once seen it.