Carole King

The landscape holds a potentially rich mixture of ideas to be mined; layers of manmade and naturally occurring features, combined with evidence of human settlement, industrial, social and political history.

Already creating a series of work concerned with maps and aspects of the landscape using sections taken at random from large scale maps I was asked to make some work in response to a particular poem by John Roderick Rees. I was particularly attracted by the short phrase ' a patchwork of little fields'. Some small experimental layered collagraph prints, drawn from small sections of maps grew to larger, more involved pieces, which incorporate recycled ordnance survey maps and pamphlets documenting local geology, combined with original print.
'Pembrokeshire Patchwork' and other pieces, use rectangles and triangles joined together, using decorative stitching, in a traditional Welsh patchwork quilt pattern. The cartographers interpretation of the landscape as a two dimensional representation is precise and factual, each element previously defined by convention, yet seen as a whole become aesthetically pleasing in their own right - these quilts, also incorporating additional information are equally visually seductive .