HALF MOON BAY ARTIST RESIDENCY

NOVEMBER 2019

New topographies of swells, currents, eddies, tides. An exchange of fixed landscape for a conversation of emerging, impermanent form. Fleeting and ephemeral.

Entire ranges of colour are dictated by the mass of waves which fold instantly into other densities, other forms. No shade survives longer than a heartbeat. An impossible scale at an impossible rate without any rational way to catalogue, classify, parse.

All that remains is pressure, the spark of ozone, and the relentless thundering drumbeat of the stirring of the moon-pulled world. The only takeaway is half-remembered colour and a pervading, resonant sense of awe.

This maelstrom is filtered through my residency studio and my vernacular of form, planning, structure, cadence, grid and graphic elements. A synthesis arises like a tide. Waves become mapped into volumetrics, to convey some of that conversation, exchange, tension.

artist statement

My artistic response is almost entirely environmental, taking my cues from spontaneous discovery of usually-urban visual signals. This was beautifully disrupted by the clean, dominant horizontals of the beach and ocean and the horizon, and my reliance on architecture and semiotic was visually unavailable. Though there’s still a structural element present, the overall work is more loose, and I can’t help feeling that the curves relate more to the natural landscape, the flora, the ocean and the colours representative of the area; the intensity of the setting sunlight, the rose-gold reflecting off the beach, the initial days of seemingly endless enveloping fog that obscured the landscape and played softly with the light.

As an island-born West Coast girl, the ocean has always been a part of my life, but I was particularly overwhelmed by the power of the currents here, coursing through me in a way both electrifying and clarifying. This energy is conveyed through the resultant work.

(Click images below to embiggen, and see descriptions)