Exhibition News - Cromer OPEN 2025
I’m delighted to have had two pieces selected for Cromer OPEN 2025 at Cromer Artspace this October.
The first of these is a cyanotype titled Interplay, part of an ongoing exploration of Sweetbriar Marshes, the Norfolk Wildlife Trust urban nature reserve near my home in Norwich. I’m following a couple of threads of curiosity - one is the human/nature entanglements in the area, which is the focus of this piece. The other, more tentative at this stage, is an exploration of the impact of climate change on phenology (the timing and cyclical patterns of events in the natural world). I will be exhibiting a wider body of work from this project at ArtDepotNR3 alongside artists Natasha Day and Rachel Burchell in October 2026 - I’ll share more as it develops.
The second piece selected for Cromer OPEN is titled Transience (cyanotype toned with buddleia).
This is an image from an ongoing documentation of slow travel. This year I’ve had the good fortune (thanks to my DYCP grant) to make various trips by train for workshops, courses, conference and retreats. A number of these journeys (Falmouth, Aviemore, Bristol) have been particularly long and slow. I started documenting the journeys - initially to keep myself entertained! - and as I did so, I started thinking about the threads of connection between these seemingly disparate places. I also found myself fascinated with the sense of time and movement on these long, slow journeys - a sense that is at once fleeting and interminable.
The original image in Transience is a digital video still, shot and edited during a train journey from Norwich to Falmouth. I then created a cyanotype from a digital negative of the image, and chose buddleia as a toner due to its ubiquitous nature alongside the train tracks throughout the journey. The plant was foraged from the Marriott’s Way, a disused railway line which now forms the cycle path I take to my studio in Norwich.
I’m really enjoying this practice of weaving together digital, on-the-fly image-making and editing, with the analogue, hands-on process of cyanotype, and weaving in the materiality of place through plants, to create these mini-stories of journeys, time, movement and connection.
Cromer OPEN starts on 15th October 2025 at Artspace on the Prom, West Promenade, Cromer, NR27 9FA, and continues until 31st October. The Private View is 5-7pm on Thursday 16th October, all welcome.
Both of the pieces selected for the Cromer OPEN have come out of an extended period of learning, research and development thanks to my DYCP (Developing Your Creative Practice) grant from Arts Council England, for which I am deeply grateful.