Preparing for Ireland trip....

 Things are pretty full on at the moment. This week (in between working full-time) I am dedicating my time to the preparation of our (Myself, Paula & Sue) research/artists in residence trip to Ireland. I will be taking postcards of some of my work and framed skeletal leaf work to sell. I am limited to what I am able to take due to flying over but hope that these small pieces will generate a little income from my time there. Workshop and the presentation of how to present my practice will be worked on this week also. My strategy for the residency will be to harness the environment to enable mark making and to produce work that has very little intervention from traditional mark making materials.
​This very much brings be back to my initial proposal for the MA. As a starting point the basic forms of mark making, prehistory, has underpinned the reasoning for my use of organic and ephemeral materials to make marks, in the broadest sense. 
'As man enters the narrow opening of a limestone cave. Clutching a flickering tallow lamp and a small, precious object, he moves slowly into the dark depths. Soon he is aware of thick smoke and the overpowering odour of burning animal bone. He hears strange sounds echoing from the darkness. He knows that, in that smoke, people are scratching images of animals on small pieces of stone, and cutting across them with multiple lines' Lewis-Williams, David, The Mind in the Cave, 200
Being versatile and observant of unassuming materials presented within the landscape. Manipulating, scratching, scraping, pressing. To pick up an object; stone, wood, charcoal, soil, clay, plant life to make a physical mark is an instinctive action that prehistorical man had evolved enough to be able do. In writing this I remind myself that I  have nowhere near touched on the questions I initially asked: What was the driving force behind these early forms of mark making and why did early man feel the desire to make a physical visual record of their lives? Maybe a subject for a PHD???
​However,  I have staid true to my practice and explored deeper the ways in which mark making can be formed through materiality intervention. It is this aspect that I will carry through into my time spent in Irish landscape.