Sheenagh Patience

It is a place of constant change and new discoveries. Across the flat space between the high and low tidal zone the sea deposits its gifts to be found and claimed, then takes back what is unwanted. With each new tide comes something new, something previously unseen.

The surface of a painting is also like an inter-tidal zone where repetition, rhythm and form can trigger fresh ideas and meaning; and, where improvisation and the smallest of variables in composition echo the complexity of nature.

Each day I walk along Tràigh Bheasdaire, the east beach on the Isle of Berneray. It is a place to observe and imagine. There is a timeless quality to shells and fragments of ceramic recently washed up on Berneray and ancient fossils found on other Hebridean islands.

The everchanging weather and mood of the sea adds to the visual stimuli.

Sheenagh Patience is an artist living and working on the island of Berneray. Her studio is a renovated Thomas Telford Parliamentary Church. Since graduating from DJCA Dundee, she worked extensively in arts education before returning to her full time arts practice as a painter and printmaker.