stratiform - accident and accumulation
s t r a t i s f o r m, mixed media on wood, 20 x 15 x 13 cm, 2024
The wooden box support lingered around my work table for months, collecting the excess materials I scraped onto it. Over time, these piecemeal remnants built up, coagulated, reacted. The whole formed a surface through accident and accumulation. This became the unexpected basis for a new painting. I wanted to preserve its gnarly, crusted texture but also to refine and imbue it with a kind of luminous, alien vitality.
the salamander and and the river delta
I’m often struck by the strange overlaps in natural structures: a salamander’s fin becomes the delta of a river; intestinal flora echoes the forms of columnar basalt. There’s a rhythm to these resemblances—organic forms repeating across scales. With Stratiform, I wanted to create a surface built from disparate natural fragments, resolving into something that oozes about with cross references to the natural world. An “alien” landscape, perhaps, but built from the familiar.
The painting ended up reading like a sample—a graft or entity removed from its source but independent. Although modest in size, the surface could suggest something vaster. Crumpled planetary terrain becomes diseased flesh; the slow geological merges with the cellular and bodily. These contradictory impressions are pulled together into a composite—a Frankensteinian patchwork.
‘Garlic and sapphires in the mud’
But the piece also invites intimacy. Bold, bright hues burnish the surface, interrupted by glossy, glistening passages. If I remember rightly, one small section was treated with vinegar and iron filings. The elemental becomes more wrought. Muddy, organic squelchiness transforms into a faceted, jewel-like sheen. I keep thinking of that line from T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton—“Garlic and sapphires in the mud.”
Stratiform is a layered thing—formed by time, chance, then embellished with colour and gloss. Tarted up by painterly endeavour. The process evolves into a chunk of painterly terrain: barnacled, encrusted, extracted. It fits the hand like a curiosity, a specimen unconcerned with whether it is a fact or a fiction.