I Can't Feel Your Arms Around Me Anymore

Edition Variable of 25.
Large linocut and monoprint, printed on Tosa Shi 55 gsm.
Paper size 81.5 x 54 cm, print size 73.3 x 48 cm.

‘I Can’t Feel Your Arms Around Me Anymore’ is titled after a line from an Emma Ruth Rundle song, Body. It’s a song that explores and confronts the grief she experienced following the death of her grandmother, it resonates with me deeply as the sudden loss of my own grandmother when I was 15 profoundly affected me. By interrogating core themes of fragility and loss throughout the MA programme, I came to realise that this grief is still present and underlies all my work.

Using a standing stone from the Stanton Drew Stone Circles as a motif, I wanted to highlight the fragility of things and ideas that appear to be so imbedded in our lives that they seem permanent. The effort put in by the builders to move these stones into place suggests that they were once incredibly important to communities and their beliefs. But the monuments now sit quietly in a field just four miles from Bristol, ruined, and relatively overlooked, their original purpose now lost to time.

Heavily diluted ink, applied as a monoprint, suggests a sense of transparency and temporality at odds with the solidity and permanence of the subject matter. The off-set ghost printed layers echo an out of focus photograph, as if the stone has shifted, or a memory that is not quite as clear as it once was.