Joanne Laws

“I hope that my readings of particular terrains, although naturally couched in terms of human scales, those of my own limbs, eyes, breath etc., are suffused by an awareness of almost inconceivably greater and unimaginably smaller physical dimensions, not to mention those of the flowery fields and terrible cliffs of dreams.” – Tim Robinsonⁱ

Since the Renaissance, no other painting technique has been subject to such zealous and detailed attempts to explain its methods, materials, and utensils as the encaustic technique of antiquity [i]

Winter Papers, Volume 8 can be purchased at: https://winterpapers.com

Featured Image: Kian Benson Bailes, Kian Sa Leaba, 2022, oil on wood; photograph courtesy of the artist and Bog Cottage.

Deep Mapping: Unseen Landscapes

We need more fluid ways of perceiving the layers that are everywhere, and new ways of calling attention to the passages between old and new, of weaving the old place into the new place – Lucy Lippard ⁱ

With Other Matter

Joanne Laws

The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden, you pass into this time – the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.[i]

Living Archive: Landscape and The Rural Imagination

 Joanne Laws

The long summer days spent in the Limestone Plain, where the gentle undulations of the ground only occasionally hid the distant rim of brown and blue hills; the marshy meadows, heavy with the scent of flowers; the great brown bogs, where the curlews alone relieved the loneliness… the savage cliffs of the Mayo coast; the flower-filled sand-dunes which fringe the Irish Sea.. all have left memories that can never be effaced.[i]

– Robert Lloyd Praeger, 1901

Communal Observances

Joanne Laws

Below are the disenchanted holidaymakers,

who have little time to bother

with the enigmatic young swimmers,

gliding over their heads.

Cnuasach: Deep Mapping

Over decades, the artist embarks on faithful departures from one painting in search of the next, never derailed by looming interpretations but content with deeper truths that overwrite such fractal commentary. Bodies of work accumulate as clusters, yet definitive meaning is shrouded and encoded – undecipherable, even to her.