I made this image on 12 November 2021
To me it is the closest that I have ever come
to making a self portrait:
Very large,
Jerked into ungainly, angry, energy
Confined by a sort of built space
But with no roof

In my childhood her mood was different and
she was stood floating
in a steep valley with hills rising on either side
But with the same spacious empty sky above

This image felt like facts that made no sense
Then on 19 September 2023
I came across a quotation from a novel
Written by Elizabeth Bowen in 1938
Called The Death of the Heart

"Each one of us, keeps battered down inside himself,
a sort of lunatic giant impossible socially,
But full scale."
The Reviewer then goes on to say that
"The human heart lives, and Bowen, hears its
"knockings and batterings".
In fact she hears nothing else".

26/09/2023

Feeling Through Structure

I was born in South Africa.
The South African landscape contains thousands of paintings on rocks.
My grandfather collected prehistoric flint tools which were unearthed when building towns. Reminders of ancient human history lay all round me.
Flint tools are beautiful beyond what is necessary for pure functionality. Even this far back in our history humans seem to find that making something well and beautifully is enriching.

When I travelled in parts of Europe and came into contact with medieval churches covered in hand carved sculptures I really felt the power of human dreaming.
Here were figures that had curves.
Figures full of human emotion.
Figures that had amazing energy often conveyed through the way that their clothes fell round and over their bodies.
And all this excitement and energy was completely at one with the geometric structure of the building.
In fact the underlying geometry stabilised and seemed to increase their power.
This was communal dreaming on a monumental scale.

I wanted to live with such objects around me in my life.
Acquiring one was not a practical proposition.
I decided that I would just have to make my own in timber.
So in 1966 I taught myself to carve.

From 1984 to 1995 I found a place to work in the Adam Pottery in Edinburgh. There I could work for ten to twelve hours a day exploring the softness and movement in clay, as well as how adding colour affects a three-dimensional form.

Since 2000 I have been making artworks using pastels and charcoal on paper.
I was taught to look at the world as if I was looking at it as a self-contained outsider.
But I experience the world as a stream of information that blows around and past my body, but mostly round my head. This constantly changing stream demands my immediate attention.
Creating art is a way that I have found to slow the movement down a bit and explore its impact on my sense of self.

I draw the outline of a figure in charcoal.
The figure must be large. I need room for her to explore her reactions and sensations as they occur in different areas.
I work into the shapes with colour, texture, and more lines.
The figure then has to find ways to re-establish herself as a recognisable, coherent, human presence.
She does this one block of colour or line at a time, while I concentrate on structural devices and decorations that might help her.

I stop working on a picture when I see that the various areas have found ways to emerge in and out of the space that she has created for herself, to form into a dance of feeling.

Lorraine Fernie
London 2022