DORSET COAST

I live close to the remarkable Jurassic Coast…a good deal of work here has been prompted by encounters in it…

Company of Birds

Over this last year of isolation…birds have become very present company

Close to Home

THE FLEET

I’m tucked away near Ferry Bridge where the wonderful Crabhouse Cafe secretes itself. An untidy little corner where an enormous Barrel jellyfish beached itself last year. It is still dark. I am there for the setting of the moon and the rising of the sun.

Restless Earths

A collection involving pieces in a show of this name at The Crafts Study Centre at UCA Farnham in 2020. An acknowledgement of common ground on the move…migration of matter- common inheritance shared by human and other-than-human life.

Frances grew up walking Fenland droves and fields around Littleport at the edge of The Wash. Its black earth shaped the fundamentals of her practice. Ice-edged Siberian winds marked childhood winters and sharpened an appetite for outdoor practice. Her way of being with the land is dirtier nowadays whilst remaining a praise poet at heart. Less attention is accorded to outcome- the appetite is for relationship and reciprocity. Water is the vehicle with which precipitation, humidity, temperature and air play with the evolving and dissolving of works.

Studio: Isle of Portland, Dorset

Elected Associate of The Royal Watercolour Society in 2022 and a full member in 2025.

BEACH CANVAS for Frances Hatch

She is open to the open air -

a painter kneeling

on bonfire-blackened shingle

mixed with debris the sea has tossed up.

Rain won’t deter her.

Quite the contrary:

it too will be something to hand,

softening surfaces, seeping in.

She works with stuff

that is all a meeting and a mixing:

greensand, gault, lias

this present moment

with geological ages

on the Jurassic coast.

Paint encounters earth

fallen from cliffs,

plant life, flotsam, all

the material makings of place.

As she anchors her canvas

with a rock and light flashes

where the cliff torn with a fall

catches the sun, I want to tell her

what her art means to me.

I could put it simply

and it would be true.

What she brings me into,

quickened with imagination,

is the living world.

But is that enough?

We need words that glow with inner light:

Words that come with a touch

of life that makes them what they are –

life of flesh and spirit,

and not with colour daubed on,

but with the inner glow

that is energy,

the vibrant flower

and the mud it grows in.

What she reveals,

what I seek to speak of,

is place renewed,

broken shore and wave breaking

here, at this moment, all the instability

of the land we live on and love.

Jeremy Hooker. June 2023

included in PRELUDES poems by Jeremy Hooker. Shearsman Books 2024