Inspiration

My workshop is on an old dairy farm. It’s no longer a working farm. The sheds are disused and the milking parlour is full of old unnamed pieces of rusty machinery and sings with the drips and flow of water whenever it rains.

I was walking into the parlour to wash my hands, one day in early summer, and I passed an old wheelbarrow. It was leaning up against the wall with its underside exposed. The metal tube of this frame had rotted at the elbows and holes had appeared. I stopped and looked, growing in one of these tiny holes was a tiny seedling. There it was, an old forgotten tool left by its owners to rust and rot, rediscovered by nature. I was amazed, it was as if a secret had been revealed. I began to see the same thing everywhere around me.

The fern growing from the top of the breezeblock wall. The ivy snaking its way under the corrugated iron roof, and exploring the room beyond. The old motor, so choked up by nettles and bramble that only parts of it are still visible.

And that was the start for me of a long line of work that tries in some way to express the feeling of joy and hope, as well as melancholy, that the things we discard are reclaimed.

The march of nature is inexorable. It does not stop, it can’t stop.

It is a subject I keep going back to whether it was in my early work, when I was newly self-employed, adding vines and Ivy leaves to a gate. Or right up to date in the sculpture I’m feverishly working on today, that same concept is still driving me.

Nature reclaims that which we leave behind.

What I’m saying in my own rambling way is that inspiration is all around us and a single idea can grow and develop, as our skill grows and develops. It can change and become something else, Leading us in new directions. 

Keeps your eyes open.