Artist Statement

“My work is rooted in memory, travel, and the shifting landscapes that shape our sense of place. For many years, I kept visual diaries filled with sketches, scraps, brochures and colour studies, and it was these fragments that became the foundation of my artistic practice. They evolved into collages, where layers of painted paper, canvas, recycled card, and thread form a visual language that sits between the real and the abstract.

I am drawn to coastlines, riverbanks, and eroded landscapes because they are places that reflect both beauty and impermanence. My work explores the marks left by natural forces: rising seas, shifting sands, fires and erosion. These changes in the environment become metaphors for memory, fragility, and the passing of time. It also connects us to our history, to the people who came before us and passed through these places, in similar and different ways, to us here in the present.

Through abstraction, I aim to evoke the essence of a place rather than its literal form. The materials I use are torn, stitched and painted, to mirror the processes of nature itself: layering, breaking down, reforming. In this way, my collages are both a personal archive of experience and a response to the wider environmental shifts we all face.

Ultimately, my art is about connection between memory and landscape, between material and meaning, between the seen and the remembered. I want the viewer to pause, reflect, and find their own space within the work.“

- John Berrick