A Summer of Imagination
Summer of 2026 is a season of pure imagination in action
A moment when strands of work weave together and I find myself seamlessly shifting between imagined futures and present-day actions, on a daily basis
In July, I travelled to 2036 with the York & North East Imagination Tour
In August, I’ll be immersed in collective lo-fi printmaking before jumping into the future of a visionary puppetry company
Experiences of collective imagination in action like these feel rare somehow, precious and transformative
And whilst there’s so much to explore in our collective imagination, that story is for another day
Today, let’s dive into personal experiences of imagination
Let’s explore where those doors to other worlds lie waiting for us, how we can leap (before we look) and what happens when we land back in our everyday reality with awe and wonder
Drawing has long been a tool that’s enabled these seamless shifts. Nature will forever be a way into other worlds
When I first imagined another future for myself, I travelled back before I travelled forwards
I sat in the dead of night, caring for our newborn son, listening to stories of landscapes from home
I went back to school, re-learning how to draw our landscape walks with colour and tone, observation and imagination
I began to imagine ways to reconnect with that world in my everyday reality. I asked curious, searching questions of my creative practice, explored in my mind the gifts of a farming childhood in a rural community, and wondered what could happen if they blended and merged and became my future, part of our family’s future
When I draw, I’m absorbed in acts of looking, translating, mark making. Hands, eyes, heart and mind are connected.
Words appear and disappear, often framed by “What if I try….?” and “What happens if this…?”
What’s more, drawing makes space for mistakes
Nothing if fixed for long; everything can be moved, erased or altered. And, perhaps most powerful of all, the blank paper - often large, black and toothed to take the pastels - transforms into an image of a landscape I’ve walked before. I can, as Nan Shephard describes in her experiences of being in the mountains, find some small way to recount that movement
“Something moves between me and it.
Place and the mind may interpenetrate until the nature of both is altered.
I cannot tell what this movement is except by recounting it”
Nan Shepard, The Living Mountain, 1940s
The landscapes I’ve walked with others, where I live and work in the North East of England, have been my starting point. My locale
Like Shephard had the Cairngorms, I have a vast expanse of our northern country to explore. A “north-minded”* life. An opportunity to experience our region not as disparate geographies, rather as "a single mountain...eddies on the surface of the plateau [from which] one does not look upwards to spectacular peaks but downwards from the peaks to spectacular chasms”**
Collective experiences of walking the landscapes of the north of England have led me to remote corners, edges and eddies within our region. Places at once awe-inspiring and dangerous, sparse and drenched in detail, densely populated through time yet isolated today
I’ve searched for ways to articulate the meaning of these (paradoxical) places and, for now, found some of the best words written by nature writers, and the closest embodied experiences in childhood
“As you sit on the hillside…the great door, that does not look like a door, opens”
Steven Graham, Walker, 1927
“To young children, of course, nature is full of doors - nothing but doors really - and they swing open at every step...place is somewhere they are always in, never on”
As I work on drawings of crossing the Pilgrim’s Way from mainland UK to Holy Island on foot through mudflats, and wildflowers spread quietly, almost unnoticed across the lead mining - farming landscapes of Killhope, I’ve wondered what connects them, me and us
Where to go next, and who with
And as I imagined, as I looked intently at what I’ve actually drawn, I came across borders; experiences of entering other worlds through the rough-stuff of a landscape. I found descriptions of features, masses, within landscapes, that elicit this response.
Like I’m circling around the words my images might contain
“To enter water is, of course, to cross a border”
Robert McFarlane, Landmarks
“To enter a wood is to pass into a different world….it is there you travel to find yourself, often, paradoxically, by getting lost”
Roger Deakin, Filmmaker, Environmentalist, Writer
Unbounded
The importance of getting lost
Words found through conversation with artist Jenny Purrett, as we searched for theme, a guide and a purpose to this year’s 4 day Summer School at DRAW Studio
And, of course, I’d found it in collaboration; in collective imagination!
I never set out to create a solo adventure
When I wrote my application to DYCP I drew on three threads, in hope of weaving something greater than the sum of its parts
Firstly, I looked to nearly a decade of deep, co-creation work in our region through Creative People and Places - acts of doing by, for and with communities collaborating with creative teams
My own personal experiences of a rural childhood getting lost in tree shadows; adulthood in a rural, northern county of infinate landscapes
And a (crazy) commitment to wondering the lanes of a creative life, searching for something I could never pinpoint but sort of just lived
I told Arts Council England in that application that I would explore…
“collaborative approaches to contemporary landscapes in visual arts practice”
With a vision of establishing a rurally based, creative company by 2030
I had no idea this phrase and ambition would rebound, grow and cascade through my work as an Artist and Creative Producer in the way that it has since
I’m glad I hold it as my guide
Whilst a creative company in it’s business sense may not yet have arrived, this summer is a moment of travelling within creative company
And like the mountains, there’s no single route in, up and back down a creative practice
If anything, it’s best explored together, tramping around, through and within; “to have gone around it like a dog to see if it is a good place…merely to be with the mountain as a friend”**
Travel through drawing into your imagination, together!
Join Jenny Purrett & I as we host
Unbounded: The Importance of Getting Lost
4 - 7 August 2026
DRAW Studio, Stocksfield NE43 7HY
Generate new ideas and ways of working in our lo-fi experimental printmaking Summer school!
Through collaborative working and individual exploration, we'll look at ways we can develop drawing into print.
Draw outside, create collaborative large-scale monotypes and tiny scale TetraPak drypoint intaglio techniques, take up one to one mentoring and join it all together in a group exhibition
All materials provided. £350 per person. Booking via Jenny Purrett
Join me for Windowscapes
Saturday 24 October 2026, 10am - 4pm
Newcastle Arts Centre, NE1 1SG
Inspired by artists like Windifed Nicholson, the window features as a compositional tool to frame a small still life and a landscape beyond
Through drawing, collage and mixed media, explore imaginative ways to link interior space, still life objects and landscapes viewed through a window
All materials provided. £60 per person. Booking via Newcastle Arts Centre
Notes
Firstly, forgive me for quoting so much Nan Shephard and Robert MacFarlane (and folk he met for Landmarks) at you! Shephard’s writing speaks like a metaphor to me and they words seem to make sense as I search to articulate my practice as it shifts beyond this summer’s work into something new and complicated and nuanced.
Now for the credits…
*Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks
** Nan Shephard, The Living Mountain
Images taken of York & North East Imagination Tour supported by Joseph Rowntree Foundation, DRAW Summer School 2025 & (preparing for) 2026 with Jenny Purrett, my own current series of landscape drawings, drawings for landscape workshops, Miscreations Theatre at Allendale Mayfair 2026