In 2017 I found a small photo of the latest bombardment in Aleppo, Syria which on further inspection after enlarging  showed up some figures dressed in black stumbling about the rubble looking for any remains of their loved ones and possible possessions.

I had been invited to extend my practice through print on a Residency at Cornwall College. Establishing a language through recent and current works where surface reality is prominent in a variety of media and this image became a central key to the work. Too hard to imagine the cost to human life I looked to the ancient Greeks, their mythological ancestors of the Mediterranean.  In sketchbooks  I made dozens of drawings from black and white photographs of the damaged Elgin marbles from the Parthenon, chosen because they express ‘no violent grief, more expression of human dignity or even pride than of desolation.’