Hibernia
During the winter months of 2020 to 21, I took some walks in Epping Forest, which is within the 5 permitted Lockdown miles from my home. They were mostly grey and wet walks, though for a short time they were icy and snowy too. It was a lovely time to get acquainted with the forest and it became the backdrop to my thoughts. Hibernia is Latin for 'land of winter'.
These paintings revisit The Family Wood (2018). The family is back in the wood, its members are going about their tasks. It's a winter wood, so less accommodating and more reflective. It is a family like my own birth family, with a son and a daughter, of a similar era to my own. The painting titles are both nouns and verbs: Dwelling, Being, Clearing, Building, reflecting Heidegger's ideas about the intrinsic 'making' nature of human beings.
Perhaps as a response to the Covid shutdown around me, I was led to think about the post-World War II rebuilding programme and the desire of my parents' generation for quiet security and prosperity. I have used as sources illustrations of family life and childhood from that time, illustrations which informed my own childhood and which reflect this need for order, conformity and security.
In Dwelling the girl reaches for a Wood Anemone, the Windflower which appears in spring. Animated by spring winds, it takes its name from the word 'anima', Latin for 'soul'. Anima is also, in Jungian psychology, the unconscious feminine. In both Being and Chrysalis the children handle an over-sized chrysalis, a mysterious transitional developmental stage. In the last Hibernia painting, Gathering, we have moved on a decade and the buildings are now established. The children have grown. This is my generation and this image, from the Windsor Free Festival in 1974, reminds me both of that festival and also of my friends at the time.
EM 2021