Field Work signals an important change of direction: colour has been re-introduced to the landscape. Above the predominant olive green, Edwards has added licks of colour and edges of white which establish a light refractory presence and greater spatial depth.
‘This recent body of work continues a desire to observe more faithfully my childhood landscape, and looks at how we locate memory through our experience of a familiar space. This exhibition also indicates a fresh start away from the essentially monochromatic palate of the past two years.’
The works are treated with characteristic attention to detail, refined brushstrokes and luminosity of surface. By shifting the perspective closer to the ground there is more focus on the land and a pastoral quality emerges. However the dramatic tension between land and sky is retained. Edwards has captured and recorded the particularities of place in describing the undulations of land and indicating its present use.
Field Work is a patching together of specific landscapes and universal skies. Most of the paintings in this exhibition form not a book of memory, but an album of broken instances. Boundaries and horizons shift with the intuitive promptings of the paint. Hedges, shelterbelts and grass fields take on the same substance of the skies.