CAROLINE McADAM CLARK
From the Wash to North Foreland
and Other Places

From the Wash to North Foreland and Other Places

I have noticed that the places that inspire me are those that are remote and about the 'edge' of things: cliffs, coasts, plateaus that rise up from the plains and estuaries that appear to be literally on the edge of the world. When my paintings or drawings are about places they are generally not topical representations of a particular landscape, they are about the 'idea' I have of that place, the 'idea' being part knowledge and observation, part intuition and part Imagination. The Highlands, the Western Isles, Orkney, the Shetlands and Cornwall have all recently been the subjects of this approach - äs have Mali, the Atlas mountains and Northwest India where the 'edge' is of landlocked escarpment and desert. These are the 'other places' in the exhibition.

For some years I have gradually been making my way around the British coast building up an archive of paintings and drawings inspired by the 31 areas defined in the Shipping Forecast . . . from Muckle Flugga and the Butt of Lewis to Lundy. This is the big unfinished project. But along with the Shipping forecast to which l am addicted for all that it suggests, there is the Inshore Waters Forecast - a gentler though no less romantic incantation of coastal place names and for this exhibition it seemed appropriate to focus on my home ground which indeed lies between the Wash and North Foreland.

In this context, London is the Thames and the Thames Estuary; Suffolk is the coast and my local river. Here I am most at ease in a place that has had a magnetic hold over me since childhood, inviting moods that are sometimes exalted, sometimes elegiac or nostalgic, but always richly suggestive. From its navigable source, 'my' river winds eastward between muddy banks and reeds, bears south at Aldeburgh and flows a further ten miles alongside the North Sea but separated from it by a narrow spit of shingle. It flows past Orford and the smudged outlines of the wartime buildings at Orford Ness till at last it swirls into the sea over the treacherous shingle banks that shift and move in the Winter gales. Navigating through these and into the sea, leaving the Orford Haven Buoy to port and heading down toward Felixstowe past the four Martello towers that stand sentinel on this deserted and crumbling coast, then steering gingerly between the red and green buoys that mark the entrance to the River Deben is always an adventure.

Only a hundred miles from London it can feel like a thousand. I get my kicks out of the River and the Sea, out of cliff edges and desolate country and the various punctuation marks along the way that are the signs of human Intervention.

Caroline McAdam Clark

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CAROLINE McADAM CLARK