Sue Crawford is a lovely person and artist. Look at her art work and you’ll see someone who studies the forms of nature and the landscape, its fluidity as shapes twist and turn, the architecture of an umbellifer head or a dandelion clock. Spend any time talking with her and her deep love of nature comes through with an appreciation of how the natural world has shaped our culture, through traditional folk songs and the poetry of John Clare.
I first met Sue a few years ago as a happy accident. I was giving a talk on wildlflower meadows at Rufford Abbey Country Park and sharing the bill with Sue talking about her art and her husband in his folk duo, Sheepish Grin. Sue was the only person who had dug up a pignut tuber as a child and eaten it – how many children today know what pignut is let alone it has an edible tuber once considered a tasty treat?
Sue kindly contributed the image of one of her paintings to the Sherwood Forest leaflet (if you see the RSPB out in Sherwood have a chat and pick up a copy of the leaflet) and a quote –
“My passion for the Nottinghamshire woodlands is always a source of inspiration to me – whether it is the slender birches of Birklands or the gnarled oaks of ancient Sherwood.”
Sue’s main medium is silk paint on silk, which she explains captures the movement in the landscape – tonal changes in colour as the light shifts. Wax sets lines on the picture around which the fluid silk paint moves, so they can capture more fixed features of a landscape.
Landscape conservation is part of a continuum of how we interact with our surroundings, and art has been used to document a relationship with the environment and its wildlife. Sue considers her paintings are memories of landscapes and we discussed how they can illustrate future landscapes. Artists as naturalists cross boundaries and when conservationists explain landscape scale conservation, a picture can tell a thousand words, as the saying goes.
I’d like to see how we can use art to connect people with their Sherwood Forest landscape and share a vision for landscape scale conservation there. How artists and conservationists work together is being explored by New Networks for Nature and has been done elsewhere, such as by Artists for Nature for The Great Fen Project
Untitled by Sue Crawford
Rufford cards by Sue Crawford