artist

Norfolk Broads

This study was based on a personal quest to rediscover a kinship with my great great great grandfather James Stark, a Norwich School painter who, in the 1830s, captured life along the labyrinth of rivers that linked the region just before the changes brought about by the railways and canals.

Travelling the 280 miles of waterways in a small motorboat for a month in the autumn of 2004, I observed the insidious entry of salt as it slowly entered the freshwater system nudging further and further inland from the coast. The river bed and marshes appeared as a living, breathing organism with gills opening and closing, the views continually framed by the top and bottom of the reedbeds.