For quite a while I have incorporated botanicals, soils, charcoal, peat and sand, and grit in my paintings, usually using acrylic medium . But it has always felt uncomfortable to bind these elements in plastic to make them stick to a substrate.

I have been granted a VACMA Award (Visual Artist and Craft Maker Award bursary) to learn about making pigments and paints and how to process earth and plants myself to include them in work without using an acrylic based medium.

I approached the mountains and hills, rivers, paths and shores that I draw and paint to collect materials, intending to avoid disturbing the fragile environments as much as possible. Inevitably I did not go very far before encountering places which had already been damaged by human action, by path and road making, extraction, and indirectly though climate change.

Where the edges of the land are crumbling and fraying the landscape is illustrating our relationship with it back to us humans. The materials eroding out of the landscape have become the materials I am using for this project.