THROUGH CLOSED EYELIDS

Series of Six Paintings, 2023.
Exhibited in The Order of the Sun and Moon, St Ives 2022.

Exibition Text

This series of intimate works on paper marks a crucial transformation in my ongoing exploration of how psychic material inhabits and emerges from landscape. Where previous work had suggested forms dwelling within West Penwith's contours, these six small paintings express a shift: the forms that surface here no longer arrive as visitors or inhabitants from elsewhere, but manifest as expressions of the earth's own animate consciousness, rising from what feels like the landscape's deepest embodied knowing.

Working at the concentrated scale of 10cm x 15cm, each piece functions as a field of investigation into what I term 'closed eyelid vision'—a particular quality of receptive seeing that allows access to the landscape's interior life. This is not the direct observational gaze of traditional landscape painting, but the meditative state where inner vision and outer terrain converge, where the familiar topography of Cornwall reveals its capacity to generate forms from its own psychic depths.

The title Through Closed Eyelids points toward this shift in perception. Behind closed lids, the landscape transforms from external geography into an internal territory where mysterious presences can surface without the interference of ordinary sight. In this darkened space of non-knowing, the green hills and expansive skies of West Penwith become generative rather than merely observed, offering up forms that seem to emerge from the substance of the earth itself.

These works emerge through the same receptive techniques that inform my larger practice; receptive processes that allow unconscious material to surface then develop through careful micro-decisions that honour what wishes to emerge.

In ‘Four Worlds,’ mysterious green forms float above purple mountains, each realm interpenetrating the others in a dance of mutual emergence. The landscape here operates not as backdrop but as active participant, generating forms that seem to arise from geological time and settle back into earthly substance. ‘Things of the Earth’ makes this relationship explicit; pink and purple shapes nestle into valleys with a kind of intimacy that suggests they have always been present.

‘Watery Dance’ introduces fluid movements that activate the terrain from within, serpentine energies that seem to flow through the landscape's underground streams and emerge as visible gesture. The dance here seems to express the earth's own dynamic nature, its capacity for movement and transformation. ‘Mercury of the Field’ extends this exploration, presenting mercurial forms that shift between states; sometimes appearing as energy and sometimes as matter.

The lunar presence that pervades my work finds particular expression in ‘The Moon's Fifteenth Day,’ where a great orb emerges from or dissolves into the pink-tinged atmosphere, no longer separate from the landscape but intrinsic to its luminous depths. Here, the moon perhaps appears as an aspect of the earth's own consciousness, a quality of receptive awareness that the landscape itself embodies.

‘Lunar Loops’ traces white spirals across the hillside like pathways between visible and invisible realms, tracing the earth's own thoughts; visible evidence of an intelligence that moves through terrain in patterns that ordinary perception cannot access.

This series proposes a new grammar for my work that further explores the relationship between psyche and place, one where the landscape ceases to be mere container for psychic projection and reveals itself as a conscious participant in the process of form-making. The ‘odd shapes’ that surface here represent not intrusions into familiar territory but expressions of the territory's own deeper nature, manifestations of what the earth itself generates when encountered through receptive attention.

These works prepare the ground for subsequent developments in the practice, where the understanding established here - that forms emerge from the earth's own depths - allows for fuller inhabitation of painted landscapes by figures, animals, and cosmic presences. But they remain significant in their own right as documents of a crucial threshold, moments where the practice discovers new possibilities for relationship between psyche, and place.

Through sustained engagement with what emerges behind closed eyelids, this series reveals painting as a practice of deep listening to the earth's own capacity for image-making, honouring the landscape not merely as subject matter but as collaborative partner in the ongoing work of bringing invisible forms into visible expression.