Sky Garden

Sky Garden is a monumental woodcut in five panels. Oak panel was used to emphasise the grain of the print. A central figure, seen from behind, looks down on a miniature walled garden full of weed-like plants, reminiscent of verdant foregrounds seen in Northern Renaissance paintings and of an idiosyncratic Japanese garden. Pictorially, Sky Garden also conjures up the arrangement of organic forms on a flat picture plain found in Matisse's late cutouts.

The wide, lateral scale of the print, without an externalising horizon from end to end, returns and envelops the image round the spectator. Standing close, in effect, the viewer is unable to see the periphery of the image. This hot-wires the viewer to the figure in the woodcut, so the garden becomes an abstracted photo-bleach, like a flared after image, caused by looking at bright light. In this way the woodcut becomes, as much an internalised vision within the mind, as anything conjured up from reality. The garden is in her head, and through looking, as she is substituted by the viewer, the garden works it's way into our heads.