About the “What Lies Beneath” painting series

Much of my art work is inspired by this stunningly beautiful and rural county which has a unique and ancient geology.

When walking the ridges and mountains in north west Herefordshire and the Welsh border counties, I'd come across marine fossils and trace fossils such as brachiopods, graptolites, and crinoids. I'd always wondered why, but only in recent years have I looked into the geology, and why they can be found on land sometimes quite high up and nowhere near the sea.

Hundreds of millions of years ago (Silurian period) the area was a shallow marine environment; and preserved in the rocks in certain places are the fossilised remains of some of the marine animals that lived way back then.

There's a fossil deposit in north west Herefordshire (it's not publicly known where) so uniquely preserved that scientists have been able to carry out 3D reconstructions of some soft-bodied marine fossils. The area is designated a “Lagerstatte” - and there are very few of these in the world. It's the name for a deposit of sedimentary strata with lots of exceptionally well-preserved fossil material. It's believed that a massive volcanic event in what is now the Pacific caused north west Herefordshire's shallow marine environment to be suddenly engulfed by a huge deluge; this quickly buried and preserved the marine life that we now find as fossil remains, in thick layers of limestone and mudstone.

I was born in Herefordshire, and have lived and worked here for most of my life. It's a county I love, though I'd also love to live by the sea. I now know that a very long time ago, Herefordshire was a shallow marine environment - so I do live by the sea just separated by a few hundred million years!

The “What Lies Beneath” painting is an imagined 'then and now' landscape, together as one. There are two other works so far, “In Siluria”, and “Iapetus Ocean” which imagine the Silurian landscape. Other work is in progress!