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Catherine Heard
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  • Work
    • 2025 -2026
      • Animals & Machines
      • Embodied Fairytales
      • Becoming Other
      • Reimagined Myth
      • Masking
    • 2023-2024
      • Tree Larking
      • Installation
      • Escape Painting
      • Hedgebank
      • Sculpture
      • Time and Decay
      • Washed Up
    • 2022-2023
      • Playscape
      • Weather
      • Through a child's lens
      • 3D Painting
      • Biblical
      • Photography
        • Somerset
        • Away
  • About
    • About
    • Contact
    • Working Thoughts
  • Instagram

Mossy Nooks in Hedge Roots

28/7/2025

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Nooks
Old twine embedded in branches like bracelets,
Small mossy spaces. 
Limbs that strangle.  
When I was a child (I had a good imagination) I would have imagined gnomes in these spaces - gnomes with hearty white beards,  like gnomes like in my precious Will Huygen book.  
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I don't see trees anymore, I see limbs, legs and arms.  90 degree angled arms like traffic conductors on busy box junctions illustrated in my old copy of the Highway Code.  
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There's something poetic about this but I'm reluctant to launch into word - painting, making, photographing and constantly singing and occasionally dancing - (or maybe it's just arsing around for the woodlouse's amusement) is enough for now.    To respond to this place, I will make it my playground.  There aren't many people in West Somerset, so no one's watching - apart from the sheep and a few woodlice and it's quite liberating to play at being a tree.  
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My work has always felt seasonal, documentation in the summer, when my tenagers are constantly hungry and I spend more energy making sourdough than painting.  But I never stop looking, especially at shadows at this time of year, looking at how they fall.  I love Phyllida Barlow's drawings - the strong shadows and wonder if she decided where the shadow would be in a drawing, or whether she made the maquettes, shone a light at them, and her shadows are true?  

I have a young assistant, who at 14, doesn't mind curling up in a tree nook for me - this is so useful, for the documentation and when the nights set in, and everyone's back at school and university this will inform new art.  I always follow the unknown, and approach things with a very open mind, I love not knowing what the art work I'll make will look like after a couple of months of playing amongst these trees.  
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