Since September 2022 I’ve been looking for structural ideas from various sources for a larger work called Q Polaroids, collection of polaroids taken by me and my son Jules, during Covid quarantine in Stirling Scotland. Essentially I had found myself staring too hard and too literally at this still life of polaroids and had come to a standstill.
To free myself of the block and change my approach entirely, I decided to imagine them as something I’d never seen before, possibly from the perspective of an archeologist way in the future. I started to imagine that maybe they were something more organic, possibly from the natural world, or not. Actually a fascinating task to unknow something.
The first three sources were a Paddle plant, some sprouting spuds on a plate and three pairs of my son’s old shoes. This fourth source, a dried log with dead Turkeytail fungi, I found walking up a river bed in the Cévennes mountains near St Andre de Valborgne.

Image 01 – ‘Turkeytail Fungi 14:27pm 07/03/23’ 32cm x 24cm – inks, acrylic & crayon on cotton paper 300g/m2

Image 02 – ‘Turkeytail Fungi 17:43pm 07/03/23’ 32cm x 24cm – inks, acrylic & crayon on cotton paper 300g/m2

Image 03 – ‘Turkeytail Fungi 16:32pm 08/03/23’ 46cm x 31cm – inks, acrylic & crayon on cotton paper 300g/m2

Image 04 – ‘Turkeytail Fungi 15:29pm 09/03/23’ 46cm x 31cm – inks, acrylic & crayon on cotton paper 300g/m2

Image 05 – Dead branch, found in the Cévennes mountains, with Turkeytail (Trametes versicolor) a type of Bracket fungi

Image 06 – Dead branch (detail)

Image 07 – ‘Q Polaroids’