Begun during the first UK lockdown in 2020, these small watercolour paintings juxtapose models and dioramas of cardboard and cement with found photos of archaeological excavations, collapsing and combining reality and artifice, history and myth, with time and scale.
They can be understood as an exploration of retreat from our uncertain times, suggesting the nostalgic longing for the consolations offered by the past. Allusions to excavations and dig sites thus connote an attempt to both recover lost narratives, and to reconnect to a sense of place.
A determination to unearth, to delve down through layers of material, and to retrieve long buried archaeology, becomes a literal and metaphorical journey into the past, a search for ‘wholeness’, origins, continuity and solid foundations, and to erect or locate a bulwark against the fracture and upheaval of the present.