 It's very important for me to find a way of grounding myself as an artist in a place. So in that way I don't take holidays. I go with my pastels and my charcoal and my paper and I make work from day one wherever I am. In this place in Corfu, there's a very strong creative vibration. It's in a house of well known artist in Greece, called Geekah. And the house has a very strong artistic energy. I'm often thinking back to the ancient Greek myths to Ovid, who wrote his metamorphosis about Daphne becoming a tree and that vibration that's always kind of there looking back into history, but also I made a kind of ritual of going back to the same trees every summer and drawing them. And as I did that, they became friends really in that way that they mirrored back to me the experience of the past year, particularly intense after the pandemic. In this kind of strange tumultuous time for the world, they just were kind of, you know, rooted and stable and ever kind of in the present, which I find is a very affirming thing about nature, that there's no stress and anxiety beyond what the weather throws at it. I work on multiple paintings at the same time, partly because I work very fast and also I destroy quite a lot. I put on, I take down. These paintings I've painted two at a time together because I had a size restriction in the studio. It was very important to me not to have music playing or podcast playing or anything else. It was an act of connection and memory that was quite vital and needed its own concentration somehow. This painting has sort of rolled around the need for kind of reinstating the image. That tree there is actually an upside down version of this tree and they are kind of speaking to each other. There's quite a lot of use of paint sticks and encaustic paint on it as well, which again references my kind of love of ancient things. It references this idea of movement and light and how this summer light kind of breaks into our memory at different times of the year. It was very much a summer painting made in the kind of depths of winter. Trees and us share, you know, we share the same light, we share the same air, we share the ground that we all come from and really since childhood I've always felt a very strong connection with particular trees and there's so much. We know but there's also so much we don't know about how sentient they are and how connected they are.