Reading Bachelard’s ‘The Poetics of Space’, and Rilke’s ‘Book of Hours’, together inhabited my thoughts and my imagination where, unknown to me, they started incubating new forms waiting to be drawn.

‘The Poetics of Space’ explores the meanings of domestic space, probing “the impact of human habitation on geometrical form, and the impact of the form upon human inhabitants”. Rilke’s ‘Book of Hours’ describes the reciprocal nature of our relationship to God and to life and ‘the radical inter-dependence at the core of existence’.

My ‘Burnt Wood’ drawings seem to offer internal spaces to explore, glimpses of the secret life of things evolving in a place we cannot see. The ‘Absence and Presence’ works evoke the transformative nature of the process of mourning; recapturing something of the essence of what has been lost.

‘The Poetics of Space’ by Gaston Bachelard, translated by John R. Stilgoe. The Orion Press, 1969

‘Rilke’s Book of Hours – Love poems to God’ translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. Riverhead Books, 1996.

Absence & Presence I (55x74cm)