Rosalie — A Project

Rosalie is the name I gave to a body of work made across three consecutive winters. It isn't a formal series in the gallery sense — it was never planned as one — but it cohered on its own, and at some point naming it felt right. The name comes from a particular stretch of path near the studio, lined with old roses that go untrimmed and grow into the hawthorn each year. I walk that path most mornings. It looked different every season and looked most itself in winter, when the hips were still on the canes and the leaves were gone.

What the work is

Rosalie is a set of watercolour studies and photography made between late October and March of three consecutive years. The subjects are the path itself, the plants along it, and the light at that time of year — low, pale, and brief. The watercolour pieces were made from the photographs and from memory; the photographs were made in the mornings, on a small mirrorless camera that I could carry in a coat pocket.

The work is quiet. Nothing dramatic happens in it. A branch of dried rose hips against a white sky. The same section of path in mud, in frost, in thin December sun. A robin that showed up in the same spot on three consecutive mornings and was photographed on all three, and the photographs look like three different robins because the light was three different things. There's a crochet piece in the set too, though it's less obviously part of it: a long stole in rose-hip red and dry-grass brown that was crocheted over the same three winters, worked on mainly in the evenings after the walks.

The photographs

Twelve photographs made it into the final set. They were edited carefully but not manipulated — the colours you see are the colours that were there, in the sense that Lightroom was used to honour the light rather than change it. Most of them are horizontal. Most of them are very quiet. A few have birds in them; none of the birds were placed there.

Prints from this series are available in A4 and A3, on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308gsm archival paper. The edition size is 15 for each image. Several are already sold. If you'd like to know which images are still available, email with the word Rosalie in the subject line and I'll send the current inventory.

The watercolour studies

Eight watercolour pieces. All on Arches 300gsm cold-pressed paper. The subjects are plant material: rose hips, bare canes, seed heads, the occasional section of hawthorn branch. The palette is narrow — ochres and muted reds, the grey-greens of winter stems, a lot of warm white paper showing through. The technique is loose; the studies are observational, not botanical in the scientific-illustration sense, though they're made with the same attention to the actual structure of the plant.

Six of the eight watercolours are available as prints (editions of 20). Two are the originals themselves, mounted and available. The originals are A4 on A3 paper, with a wide margin for framing. If you're interested in one of the originals, email to ask whether they're still available — originals from this studio don't come up often.

The stole

The crocheted stole is the piece in this set that most people are surprised to find here. It's a long triangle, worked in alpaca-wool blend in three tones: a deep rose-hip red, a dry-grass ochre, and a cool grey-brown that is roughly the colour of winter tree bark. The palette was chosen in October of the first year and never changed across the three winters of working on it. The stitch pattern is a simple chevron with an elongated border. Nothing conceptually complicated — just a long slow piece of cloth that kept company with the rest of the project.

The stole is not for sale. It's the only piece in the studio that isn't, and that's on purpose. It's the physical proof that the project happened.

How this project connects to the rest of the studio

Rosalie is the most personal thing currently on this site, and the least obviously commercial. But it represents something true about how the studio works: the same hands that crochet the blankets also take the photographs and make the watercolour studies, and the work comes from the same daily life rather than from separate professional identities. The path is ten minutes from the studio. The camera is always in the coat pocket. The stole was on the needles for three years. None of it is separate.

If this is the kind of work you were looking for, the gallery has the broader context. The projects page has other recent finished work. The commissions page explains what the studio takes on if you'd like something made specifically for you. And the about page fills in whatever biographical context is missing.