Paul Croft
Participating in We Live With The Land & The Land as Other
In my work, I have always been interested in the development of personal visual language, as a synthesis of things observed, experienced, known and understood.
Fascination for motif, deriving from a built-up resource of seemingly insignificant objects, observed, found and collected; combined with research into the etymological development of language and the pictographic origins of symbols, letters, alphabets, characters and words, is the common principle underpinning much of this work.
Through drawing, collage, printmaking, and the use of lithographic crayon and tusche printed from stone and from plate, motifs are generally composed with ambiguity and uncertainty of meaning, liberating interpretation, enabling objects to be read and to be seen in calligraphic terms.
For me, landscape, objects found, fleeting views, perceived, seen, documented through memory, sketch, word and photography all become part of that resource, a repository or library of components, available for composition and reconstruction through drawn, etched and printed line, wash, tone and colour.
Increasingly however, lithography plates, stones, blocks and stencils have themselves become a part of that repository. The intention for this project, is thus to develop a thesaurus of deconstructed forms, like words from a dictionary available for selection, to be combined and recombined, synthesised in any number of different ways, like hot metal type in text, yet to produce a graphic exploration and representation of place.
