1-2-1 Reflections.
In my recent tutorial with Jonathan, we touched on how I have been feeling since my recent diagnosis of autism and ADHD, and how this may have impacted my practice. I have been feeling more fatigued and lower in energy, not because of the diagnosis itself, but because of what an undertaking it has been. I want to sit with it for a while, to process this new information without rushing or forcing anything. What has shifted within my practice is not necessarily the work itself, but my understanding of it. There is a new layer to it now, an added sense of complexity to what was already there.
Since being diagnosed with alexithymia, I have started to recognise that much of what happens in my paintings is a translation process. The landscapes I produce feel as though they are already there, waiting. It is less about constructing them and more about uncovering them, almost as if I am using a reverse eraser, scraping back layers until the image slowly reveals itself piece by piece.
What is becoming increasingly important to me is the feverish drive to fill every inch of the page. In contrast to the balance often strived for in Japanese and Chinese ink paintings, my balance comes through filling the space with competing lines that bend and blend into one another. When looked at closely, the marks feel abstract, almost chaotic. Lines bleed into one another. Ink pools and fractures. There is noise on the surface. Yet when you step back, a landscape emerges. Something coherent. Something whole. That tension between chaos and clarity feels deeply aligned with how I experience the world internally.
The noise on the page feels like a translation for feelings and experiences that I struggle to articulate. There is a tension between myself and the canvas, where the canvas acts as a mirror, reflecting back to me what needs to be said as I am painting onto it. In many ways, the work speaks first. I understand it afterwards.
When I am painting, I enter a flow state where thinking quietens. The painting begins to reveal itself, taking on a life of its own. It almost feels as though the paper is alive, and there is something moving through me and onto it. The act becomes less about control and more about surrender. That surrender feels significant in light of diagnosis. If language does not always come easily, then perhaps the body, the hand, and the ink have been speaking on my behalf all along.
We also returned to the importance of place in my work. How do I not only represent place, but re-embed the work within it? One idea is to bring completed pieces back to the landscapes that inspired them and photograph them there, to see how they sit within the soil, the grass, the wood. To test whether they feel as though they belong. I am equally drawn to the idea of taking smaller sketches out into nature and allowing them to enter into conversation with their surroundings. What shifts when the work is placed back into the environment that fed it?
This has led me to think more deeply about materials. Traditionally, the colours within certain tartans reflected the landscape of the clan who wore them, with plants from the area used to dye the wool. If the land once dyed the cloth that marked belonging, what would it mean for the land to stain the paper that holds my work? I am curious about making my own inks from plants and materials gathered from the landscapes that inspire me. Jonathan referenced oak gall ink, formed from growths on oak trees. The process itself ties the act of mark making back to the tree. Even paper, in its origins, is bound to the natural world. There is something cyclical in that. A quiet lifecycle embedded within the work, honouring a sense of place.
Thinking about the next five months, I am starting to see how these conversations might extend into doctoral study. Not as an abstract ambition, but as a continuation of the questions that are surfacing now. The upcoming research discussion feels like an opportunity to test some of these ideas aloud, to consider how themes emerging through diagnosis, belonging, and place might form the foundations of a PhD proposal. I find myself beginning to think carefully about potential supervisors, and about where this line of enquiry could deepen.
I keep returning to the idea of communication without words. What would it be like to have an exhibition with no written panels, no explanatory text, no narrative imposed from the outside? Just the pieces, and perhaps the ambient sounds from the landscapes that inspired them. A secondary experience, yes, but still rooted in my own. A way of inviting the viewer back into place without telling them what they are supposed to feel.
If my work has always been a form of translation, then perhaps the next step is to trust that language is not always necessary. Perhaps the landscapes have been speaking all along.
