The Jabberwocky got me. My three year old tongue and lips slid around its rhythmic words. Sucked me into poetry and lyricism. There’s clarity in a melody of measured words, bars off from small talk with its indirect, illegible intentions strung between chords. The written word won’t sneer, shout, or shame, when you hold it to your body, and dissect it slowly. It begs for the lingering lull, and the curious inspection of its beats and rhythms.

It was the Arnolfini Portrait that got me next. I can’t tell you where I found it to copy, but my young self with pencilled-up hand was rapt. I got lost in drawing every fold of that long, green dress. Bore its turns into my small bones, not just my blank paper. Lured into the rhythms and forms of undulating drapery, reminding me of shapes in landscapes, my pencil marks wove through light and dark. The convex mirror on the back wall had me enthralled, as it held the whole room in its curled distortion, artist and all. I drew that painting word for word, pulled off a living room floor in ‘80s Scotland, and into a fifteenth-century Flemish wedding, where both me and “Van Eyck was here”.

I sometimes collect myself in a collage of words. Writing to speak, and to read what I think. A page of scribbled syllables beams my thoughts to my brain, as they wriggle too fast in my head to be read. But there’s things even words can’t carry or catch. That’s why there’s art. Paint reaches down into the underneath. In the buried strata of language landscapes, where words aren’t born yet, and time doesn’t tick, I wrestle with what I can’t resist. I chase some precise combination of visual sounds, layered, and surviving erasure, broken and weathered. The fragments that linger, refusing to be glossed over, and stir in you what was once silenced, or hidden.

I’d like for all those who’ve been shushed to know of the opus of margins where the voices of the hidden unfold in. That in painting and poetry there’s freedom, and belonging. I’ve long known the space that wraps around meter and colour is a safe place to curl up and speak up in. In the space between my body’s contours and the canvas, I’m knee deep in my methods and material interests, in stacking and scraping away layers of colours, or in the pages and paintings of other artists and writers, in margins and gutters. I read between the lines and the marks, breathe in colour, and taste every word unspoken that’s woven in silent landscapes of syntax and composition.

My work lives in the same ground. For now. In layers and histories, landscape and body, their testimony, and its erasure, and in what persists and what survives, and what those fragments carry. I'm drawn to making sense of it all, to what gets covered over, and doesn’t, and why, and to what a painting holds that crafted words can't. Art making is a language of ancient origin, a long, lyrical body of conversation that goes right back to the beginning. Find me in its belly. Knees on the floor. Head in the poetry of art.