The Pea Children and Illuminations
The Green Children of Woolpit is a story from Suffolk which describes two green children, brother and sister, who appeared in the village of Woolpit, speaking an unknown language and eating only broad beans. The story is first recorded in the late 12th / early 13th century. So soon after the Norman invasion, could it describe the experience of having strangers in a Saxon land?
The Illuminations return to a world of English and Northern European folk traditions, faerie painting and botanical art. With references to the female hysterics of the Paris Saltpetrière, Till Eulenspiegl, the silhouettes of Lotte Reiniger, Old English folk tales and Edwardian women illustrators. This is a world of intuition and anti-reason. It is possibly a world more inhabited by women.
In part these paintings manifest my own wish to explore my imagination. But also they refer back to my interest in Englishness and the English imagination.
In that way, they are linked to the Surrey Homes paintings which are also about the English dream. And the Edwardian painters and illustrators, Margaret Tarrant and Helen Allingham, whose work I have referred to in the past and in these paintings, were both based in Surrey.
EM 2025