Introduction In late March I took an impromptu trip to Avebury in the English county of Wiltshire. My first experience of this special place came a few years ago when travelling from Swindon to Devizes to see an Eric Ravilious exhibition. This was a new land to me, and I had no real knowledge of the locality. So when the trundling bus, making its way down a small B road, was suddenly in between huge standing stones only a few feet away, I was taken aback and fascinated by thi

Different landscapes in our sense of the world also speak to us differently, and here it serves us to consider the aspect of ‘North’ in Phillips’s work. Made on and of the chalklands of England’s South Downs, then nurtured and moulded in art school in South Wales (where his dissertation for his degree in Fine Art provides us with another clue -  ‘Remedy in the Affliction: Beginning with the Wound’) the intervening years have slowly led the artist Northwards.

Stravaig is the journal of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, a body of work exploring the relationship between imagination, place, and the living Earth. This publication reflects an ongoing thread in my work, where landscape , imagination, and psyche meet. This year the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics celebrates its 30th anniversary with this edition of Stravaig. I am delighted to have two recent works published in the new edition of their journal Stravaig. There they find t

What does it mean to listen to the Earth? Not as a metaphor, but as an act of reverent attention. For those whose work engages with psyche and image (particularly psychotherapists and artists in this instance) the question can evoke something ancestral, a realignment of the senses with our most natural way of being in the world. We are accustomed to listening deeply: to silences, the symbolic, to psyche speaking through image and metaphor. So what happens when we turn this sa

Last week I visited the west country, during a spell of unusually prolonged warm and sunny weather for the British Isles during spring. This journey was not planned as a guide, but as an encounter with the mythic and magical in Devon and Cornwall, following a sense of place rather than a fixed route. Entering the Landscape - The Power Of Dartmoor The granite Tors of Dartmoor. I found these places profoundly strange and powerful, with the unusual forms of rock that occupy the