For two-weeks, I was artist-in-residence at Cambridge Artworks, working within their re-purposed caravan studio ('The Cabinet of Curiosities'). Returning from Glasgow to the East-Anglian landscape of my childhood, I used this semi-urban, semi-natural space to examine how these environments can collide, alongside my own emotional relationship with the land.

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Cocooned in this isolated metal home (a standard feature of the summer countryside), I explored my maternal embodiment of the rural, drawing figures warped by their protective limbs, with muscular frames akin to work-horses.

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Walking through Midsummer Common each day, I was struck by the roaming cattle, herds of which have grazed on the land since the 12th Century. These slow, hulking Red Polls not only jarred pleasingly against the over-looking 1970s new-builds, but also provoked an investigation into the bodily nature of the countryside; the corporeal rural.

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Research into this ancient Cambridge meadow revealed stories of plague burials being unearthed, walkers dragged from the mud via a human chain, and air raid shelters dug into nearby banks like a warren of protective burrows.These confluences of flesh and earth, of disease, shelter and danger, led to a triptych of wood-cut prints (still in process with the proofs shown below).

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August 2019