Pastel Drawings

During the first part of the year following my time spent as Artist in Residence at Dr. Neil’s Garden – you’ll find the work I made that year in the Such Fragile Futures Gallery here – I found myself unable to stay away from the garden, such is its pull for me. Following my intuition, I kept on drawing and slowly creating this series of pastel drawings as the garden and I moved through the seasons. Noticing more and more with each visit, I felt a growing sense of belonging and of time being “bent round into my reach” as described by poet Alice Oswald in her beautiful poem, Prayer, introduced to me by then gardener, Claudia Pottier…

Prayer

Here I work in the hollow of God’s hand
with Time bent round into my reach. I touch
the circle of the earth, I throw and catch
the sun and moon by turns into my mind.
I sense the length of it from end to end,
I sway me gently in my flesh and each
point of the process changes as I watch;
the flowers come, the rain follows the wind.

And all I ask is this – and you can see
how far the soul, when it goes under flesh,
is not a soul, is small and creaturish –
that every day the sun comes silently
to set my hands to work and that the moon
turns and returns to meet me when it’s done.

– from The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile by Alice Oswald