‘all irresistibly impelled to the achievement of this moment’
                                                                                               Jacquetta Hawkes, ‘A Land’

Recording the world around me through photography, drawing and text, I am primarily interested in place, land and landscape.  I view landscape as a palimpsest, a many layered document that has been written on and erased over and over again, that simultaneously contains evidence of the present and back through time into deep history.  The materials I collect are influenced by research into European art, poetry, philosophy, landscape history, social history, mapping, ecology and geology.  I use the gathered material as basis for paintings, artist books and poetry.

The works pictured are of Herefordshire, sourced using OS Explorer maps and Google Earth and relate to land familiar to me in daily life, that I have walked through, driven past; photographed and painted as more traditional views.  I enjoy the way the aerial viewpoint shifts the perception of a landscape familiar as vistas and views by making more apparent the land’s form and uses.  I aim to make paintings that represent the accumulation of events that lead to that which we see now whilst creating compositions that have an aesthetic and material appeal.

Rebecca Finney 2018