The studio extends beyond its physical boundaries.
It begins with encounters: a colour, surface, fragment or temporary marking noticed within the surrounding landscape
My studio occupies part of a former railway warehouse close to Margate beach. Positioned between the railway, the shoreline, Dreamland and Arlington House, it sits within a landscape of arrivals and departures, recreation and industry, permanence and continual reinvention.
The building has passed through different uses, including a period as a laboratory for the Margate sustainable natural skincare, fragrance, and wellness business formerly known as Haeckels, now Dulcie. Traces of storage, manufacture and experimentation remain embedded in the architecture. I think of the studio as another temporary occupation of the space: part workshop, part archive and part laboratory.
Its location continually enters the work. Flint, chalk, shingle, seaweed, rusted metal, burnt wood and manufactured fragments are encountered along the coast and brought back into the studio. Here they are photographed, arranged, pressed, cast, translated or placed in relation to painted and constructed forms.
Rather than insulating the work from its surroundings, the studio allows the outside world to pass through it.
A studio between things
The area around the studio produces an unusually concentrated set of relationships:
the railway warehouse represents movement, distribution and former industry;
the beach introduces erosion, accumulation, migration and tidal exchange;
Dreamland carries cycles of spectacle, abandonment and reinvention;
Arlington House brings post-war Brutalism, vertical scale and contested regeneration;
the former Haeckels/Dulcie laboratory connects the site with seaweed, extraction, biological processes and material research.