The Peak District, summer 2024. I had been feeling the need to draw landscape, to get back to the roots of what I do, for some time. In 2004 the north Nottinghamshire landscape, with softly undulating arable fields, that changed colour with seasons, light, weather and farming, became the starting point for my work. This is my county of birth and such fields amazed me a child, as I would feel a kind of intense, almost physical sensation, as though I were being drawn into the colour and across the lines. As I drove repeatedly through this landscape from Cardiff to Worksop in Nottinghamshire during the course of my MA in 2003/04, I was reminded, to my delight, of this sensation, so much so, that it became the core notion of my practice. Colour and line change a space, they force the viewer to experience it in a different way, and they change the sensation of looking into a palpable, almost physiological experience.

My parents moved form Worksop to the edge of Sheffield around 2010. Family visits since then have consisted of finding play parks and ice cream for my son, not an exploration of the hills and valleys that lie a mere 10 minutes down the road. Only in the last 2 years have I realised the extent of some of this landscape and a month ago I found some time to draw…