TIDAL SCRIPTS

Line has been at the centre of my practice for more than two decades.

My work begins with the simplest of gestures: the movement of a hand across a surface. Rooted in an early engagement with calligraphy, my practice has evolved through drawing, painting, performance, and mark-making, continually returning to the expressive potential of the line.

Tidal Scripts is an ongoing series that extends this investigation through the vocabulary of the sea. Words associated with oceans, tides, currents, horizons, and water are written repeatedly, often drawing from languages encountered through travel and lived experience. As the words accumulate, language gradually dissolves. Meaning gives way to movement. Writing becomes drawing. Text becomes texture.

The works are informed by the movements found in nature: the pull of tides, the flow of currents, the cyclical rhythms of water, wind, and time. Like the sea, each mark is both singular and part of a larger continuum. Lines overlap, recede, return, and gather into shifting fields of movement that evoke processes of erosion, memory, and transformation.

Working within sketchbooks allows the practice to remain immediate, intimate, and responsive. The format accompanies me across places and coastlines, creating a record of observation, memory, and connection. Each page functions as a field of marks where repetition, density, rhythm, and colour evoke the experience of water rather than illustrate it.

Repetition becomes a meditative act. The page records the traces of thought, gesture, and duration. Rather than depicting the natural world, these works seek to embody its rhythms. They exist between writing and drawing, intention and instinct, structure and flow.

Each drawing is both a fragment and a continuum—a moment within an ongoing conversation between line, language, movement, and the sea.