Alison churchill

Cyanotype on Japanese washi.

Stones float....

Each silver scale

Carries the moon

To the sea's depths.

A longing, an appeal. Especially strong after the atrocities of October 7th 2013 and the subsequent horrific reprisals. Wordless words, communication without overt meaning - but intensely meaningful. Hidden in the layers of strips is the Kannon sutra — written in hiragana, charging the work. See this blog on the Kannon sutra.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/wildfoxzen/2022/05/disclosing-the-hidden-teaching-of-the-ten-line-kannon-sutra.html

Finally, after 10 years I have been able to paint the water patterns I have seen! I had thought I didn’t have the skills to reproduce them and why reproduce them anyway? But now I feel I have embodied the dancing patterns to a degree at last.

Acrylic on Fabriano roll.

Although the photograph captures them more directly!

My primary material is water, which I pour or splash onto a surface and let it find its own transparent form. I blow fine particles of coloured pastel dust onto the watermark to make it visible.  As the dust settles on the meniscus, it breaks the tension and skims over the surface to fall at the edge, drawing a natural line. Now that the tension is broken, the water slides slowly over the surface, pulling the dust with it, making new boundary lines. The drafting film support gives a soft and diffuse light in which the forms swim.  

Who are they, and what do they wish to convey? They are silent — to our ears —but urgent at the same time. They arrived suddenly, unannounced, out of nowhere, but after a long journey. They have been here before. They are here to hold us to account?

Glittering rivers. And glassy green rivers. Alive.

Paper is absorbent and captures the energy of the water at the moment it hits the surface. Pastel dust makes what was an invisible mark visible.

I became mesmerised by the constantly changing patterns which play on the surfaces of the streams, ponds, mill-races in my nearby valley some four or five years ago. These dazzling patterns have no mass, they are empty, made of light.  Playing on the mind, setting up rhythms in the body, they have been active in my drawings ever since.