Northland and the Lays explores the landscape of the imagination. By appropriating fragments of myth and folklore, tales and traditions from family histories, cautionary tales, science fiction and material from antique reference books, Northland is a place to explore desire, fantasy and the unknown. In journeying there, new possibilities for adventure and discovery open up.

My initial experience of this world was through my drawings of the intricate studies of the inhabitants of Northland, the Lays.

I looked at the gestures and faces of people in allegorical scenes, painted by Renaissance Masters and other history painters, including Cignaroli, Bartoleme Esteban Murillo and John Hamilton Mortimer and in these saw an awakening of rapture, anguish and understanding. 

The characters in these allegorical paintings were in moments of transfiguration, being visited upon by something greater than themselves. The experience changed them entirely.

I combined these expressions with drawings from 19th century bronze sculptures and created the Lays – rapt, fearful, uncertain; caught in private moments of epiphany or transformation.

Each of the Lays has his or her own story to tell and are watched over by the island’s guardian, Miss Ethel Grimbaldeston, an enigmatic, stern seamstress who lives with her bachelor brother, Albert, who is the island’s registrar. Between them, they have the measure of the island’s people…

I come back to these stories and the wider landscape of Northland in drawing, printmaking, sculpture, animation, correspondence and professed ‘found objects’, both genuine and constructed, to build a framework for a body of work which challenges the line between fiction and fact.