Virginia Colback

THE Channel Islands form an archipelago of exceptional beauty 19 miles off the north-west coast of France. My art to date has been primarily an attempt to capture the atmosphere created by their unique combination of environmental ingredients, including huge tidal ranges, reefs, richly varied landscapes and geology and distinctive marine and countryside habitats.

Jersey’s literal isolation, which is the source of its beauty, its heritage and its political independence, has ironically also been the basis of the erosion of its traditional character and the transformation of the ways in which its inhabitants interact with its environment, both man-made and natural. In the space of less than half a century, my native island has been changed from a quiet rural backwater to an overcrowded, high-pressure international finance centre based on its unique constitutional status.

With inspiration from studying artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Gerhardt Richter and Julie Mehretu, my drawing and painting has reflected the essential beauty of the coastal and agricultural environment, carefully stewarded by generations of Islanders, including my forebears. My work was described by Jane Human, who judged the 2008 Fox Competition, in which my work about quarries was Highly Commended, as follows:  ‘The drawn marks tentatively feel their way across the surface of the canvas, and one has a sense of directly observing the artist in the process of understanding the space, the environment of the quarry and of how to encapsulate this on the two dimensional picture plane’.

In 2010, I was artist in residence at the National Trust for Jersey’s headquarters, where I exhibited a collection of landscapes based on National Trust sites.  In September 2011, I mounted a one-woman exhibition at the Jersey Arts Centre, with work based on a five-day stay marooned on the desolate Ecrehous reef, halfway between Jersey and France. It showed the reef from an aerial perspective at low and high tide and a frieze of the Beaufort Scale, where I attempted to create a visual language of signs to show the force of the wind.

In the next stage of my development, I wish to find an artistic vocabulary with which to express the sadness felt by many Islanders at the final passing of their traditional ways to be replaced by a stressful, cynical materialism as new influences overwhelm tradition. I plan to incorporate what skill I have acquired in landscape painting and drawing with symbolic and gestural elements to produce work which will be more political, both celebrating and mourning the transformation taking place.