Scots Pine, Abney Park Cemetery

A3 Limited edition signed giclée print, edition of 20. Unframed.

This print is taken from a watercolour, gouache and pencil work. During lockdowns in London, I would walk in Abney Park Cemetery and visit a deep old oak, a resilient hornbeam, a reaching ash, time-travelling service trees from Fontainebleau, and this beautiful protective pink brown and sage Scots pine. I loved them more every day.

There were graves I visited too, one of which that I still think about here in Bristol, which was a joint modernist memorial to two women, Harriet Delph and Frances A. Garlick, both born in the 19th century. They lived and taught together in Hackney, particularly in schools for blind pupils and seem to have been pioneers for working-class education and self-supporting women. Delph herself was blind. It’s a cemetery known for holding similar narratives.

One of my greatest achievements before leaving Hackney to move west in 2021 was finally learning the map of the cemetery in my mind. It’s such a tangle of tiny paths that I’d never managed it before the pandemic. One of my most precious belongings is a map of the cemetery that a friend bought for me when we moved, knowing how much those paths meant to me - and that I feared forgetting them.

Several friends also let me take them on my loops, which I’d often imagine like threads of a loom weaving back and forth along the parallel paths, binding with the other regulars passing by, or wrapping round those sitting for the day on a tomb, often with nowhere else safe to be.

Green spaces like this held me together many times during covid, but for years before too. They are so fundamental and belong to everyone.

I’ll be giving £5 per print to the Abney Park Trust.

Note that a percentage of all my profits goes to charity and towards funding other artists.