Beverley Thornley

These 10x10cm paintings are inspired by Venice buildings, floors and bridges. They are painted using ink I have made from materials collected in the city and pastels.

During the Covid lockdowns I explored two small, relatively unknown, rivers from source to confluence: the Afon Llynfi in Powys during summer 2020 and the Moselle Brook in north London in winter 2021. Both were wonderful doorstep discoveries facilitated by the pandemic. The rivers yielded materials to make ink, stories of their history and environment and small, very welcome, adventures.

Queenborough, on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, has a rich industrial history linked to its Thames Estuary location. Many industries here were based on extracting and processing earth products. They included Alfred Johnson & Son Ltd, a major manufacturer of sanitary earthenware. Demolished in the 1990’s, fragments of the ‘pyramid’ sanitary ware, and of the saggars used to fire them, now wash up on local beaches. I am using these found fragments in this ongoing body of work.

Stone, a parish bordering the Thames in North Kent, was quarried extensively for chalk last century. The pits are fast disappearing under pressure for development land. A childhood connection drew me back to this landscape and my project involved researching the geology of chalk, the history of the cement industry, the companies restoring the pits, and workshops and walks with local people. The materials gathered - chalk, flints, memories, maps, news, photos - form the basis of this body of site-specific art work.

On first glance one lump of rubble looks much like another, but a detailed inspection reveals its unique composition, colour and shape. It embodies not only its origins, but also time and location. Similarly a closer look at a rubbly scene in a newspaper uncovers the different destructive forces behind the collapse, the surviving structures, the various remnants. This body of work draws on collections of pieces of rubble from many places, photos of rubble in newspaper articles and also the language used when referring to rubble.

Rock a Nore is an area of Hastings, Sussex where many walls and buildings are made of the local stone. These two works, made for an exhibition in The Crypt gallery of St. Mary in the Castle, use pigments made from this stone and naturally formed patterns of the stone’s erosion.

On my travels in New Zealand and Australia I used mineral pigments from different places to create rock drawings on site and rubbings on A6 khadi paper. I am now using the pigments to create larger scale drawings. The work depicts the nature my journeys and the character of the places I visited.  

Montalivet is a small seaside resort on the Atlantic coast of France. Storms are eroding the coastal dunes exposing bands of ochre, clay and lignite and raising the water table so natural oil leaches across the beach. These materials and their imprints on the beach have been used to create prints on site and studio based drawings.