I live and work on the Jurassic Coast of Dorset where the landscape continually inspires my life and informs my art. I make abstract, conceptual drawings that explore the contradiction of living in a locale of beauty and wonder, yet in a world of challenging issues. Much of my work is about the interplay of opposing forces: chaos and order; intellect and emotion; land and sea; permanence and ephemerality.

The coast is a place where deep time meets fleeting time: geological time is overlapped by tide time. The coast where I live is continually eroding. Cliffs that were formed over millions of years shed hundreds of tons of rock in seconds and it takes surprisingly few tides to remove nearly all trace of each fall. It takes surprisingly few passes with an eraser to remove nearly all trace of a drawing that took hours to create.

Yet it seems that everything leaves some marks of its history. The Dorset landscape is rich in megalithic remains and I am fascinated how we can read the trace of all that has passed over and through it. Fossils, field patterns, stone circles, tumuli, cropmarks, tracks, boundaries are indicators of a layered record that is never completely obliterated. The smudged and inscribed surface of the paper tells the forensic story of my drawings.

And how do I, as an artist, acknowledge the trace of the wider world from my rural seclusion? I do not have the power to erase the atrocity of war, or paint over suppressive dictatorships, or scribble out the inequalities and injustices. Yet even in this age of fake news and coverups the perpetrators of these crimes cannot completely hide their misdeeds. The bones can be found in the deserts; the mass graves in the forests; the emails restored from the deleted hard drives. I cannot ignore the greed and evil but the battle’s no longer mine to fight, so I guess the best I can do is take Beth Orton’s advice and “learn the trick to turn What’s not so pretty into something more beautiful”.