Elephant in the Room (2021). An installation at Rockingham Castle, part of the group exhibition 'The Howse Shal Be Preserved'

During lockdown I entered into dialogue with Rockingham Castle staff and requested essential ‘ingredients’ to be sent to me in Glasgow. These included Oak galls from the trees in the castle grounds and metal from the locks inside the castle itself. This connection with the ground staff and domestic team helped forge a sense of physical connection to the site and it's history. Boiling the metal and oak galls together to make ink, I used paper gifted by the castle to create hundreds of prints and drawings. The process was one of responding to the interplay of ink and paper and being alive to the countless possibilities of chance and material agency. Amongst many other things I took inspiration from the ‘elephant hedge’ in the castle grounds which appears to reveal and conceal many hidden forms. My installation in the wooden 'Panel Room' plays on this sense of uncertainty. Through the careful placement and display of numerous prints, drawings and artefacts - some of them half-hidden - the work suggests a set of alternative narratives which relate to the process of ink making and to the unconscious, suggesting the uncanny presence of a deluded naturalist