This series of works grew out of a month-long residency at Stiwdio Maelor in the small village of Corris, in North Wales. 

I arrived in the village not knowing its stories. Wandering through the valley, down to the river and up into the graveyard, I began to imagine a weird hidden life for the village. I started to make drawings in which ghostly black dogs wandered the streets and horse-spirits haunted the river, and reclusive faces peered from ivy-grown windows. 

These thoughts were fuelled by ‘The Magic Bridge’, an album by Richard Dawson, whose music contains deranged folk-tale style narratives. I replayed this endlessly as I drew and the rain bashed on the skylight in the studio: 

‘There is a black dog in the sky...that pisses and slobbers all over the land’. 

Within the lithographs, Corris’ smoking chimneys and satellite dishes are glimpsed from the dark nettly edgelands, the tangled wet woods, and the green goosegrass-sticky riverbed. The human figures enact night-time processions and secret rituals, which intersect loosely with various fairy tales - ‘The Goose Girl’, ‘The Wild Swans’ and ‘Rumpelstiltskin’. These are tales permeated by an atavistic sense of female magics and shapeshiftings – women escaping from the traps and patterns of the stories by spinning flax into gold, or nettles into shirts. Living there, outside the life of the village, I found a need to weave my own myths into the landscape; creative place-building as an act of home making.