"My Heartland, Heartland, Heartland"

This is 'My Heartland, Heartland, Heartland', painted for 'Awbopbopaloobop', Transition's show of new work informed by song lyrics.

I chose Heartland by the Sisters of Mercy. It's from about 1984 and the b-side to Temple of Love. It was one of my favourite songs as a teen and I used to listen to it on my walkman on the school bus travelling through this very landscape.

I've been playing a few old tunes while making these small personal pictures, but Heartland in particular has become something of a talisman. I think it's expansive doominess has bolstered my investigations or at least helped remind me of being a teenager in these big natural spaces. It's a sort of romantic goth lament, and when I listen to it I see leaden skies, twisting mud-tracks and distant hills. My mind travels over endless fields from above like a sweeping camera hurtling through the air, and I smell utterly un-London smells, like moss and mud, and all very definately on the edge of rain, as it often is near Wales.

A goth-rock b-side probably seem a strange soundtrack to be echoing through Housmans 'blue remembered hills' but not to me, to me it seems entirely appropriate. But then that's the surprise of working with personal memory, throwing up as it does 'a crowd of twisted things'.

Show coincides with a special rock'n'roll edition of Garageland.
Awopbopaloobop
15 Nov - 21 Dec 2008
www.transitiongallery.co.uk