Falling Light

Icaria is an ongoing printmaking series begun in 2023, exploring flight, endurance and transformation through the figure of a female Icarus.

Icaria is an ongoing body of work that reconsiders the myth of Icarus through a female figure who constructs her own wings and determines her own flight. Where the traditional myth culminates in hubris and collapse, Icaria proposes endurance, adaptation and self-directed motion. Flight is approached not as spectacle but as a sustained negotiation with gravity, balance and constraint.

Combining linocut, monotype, ink, paint and expressive mark making, the series brings together the body, wing, field and fragment as signs of movement, resistance and becoming.

Across the collection, winged figures move through layered abstract spaces of black, grey and deep red. Textures, marks and open areas of paper create a sense of suspension, as if the figures are caught between ascent and descent, presence and disappearance, vulnerability and strength. The repeated image of wings becomes a way to think about adaptation, self-determination and the work of continuing.

Rooted in contemporary printmaking, Icaria expands the myth of Icarus into a more open and embodied language. These works are not about a single moment of falling, but about the labour of flight itself: the making, carrying and testing of wings in uncertain conditions.

  • Abstract printmaking artwork with linocut winged figures, expressive black and red ink marks, layered textures and gestural mark making on a white ground.

    Between Heaven & Earth ll (2023)

    Monotype with linocut and mixed media on Canson Edition 320gsm paper 80x180cm

  • Abstract artwork featuring a pink stylized hand holding a spear, with prominent arrows and splashes of black and gray paint, on a textured white background with various shapes and patches.

    Falling Light (2023) One

    Unique Monotype print with linocut and mixed media on Canson Edition 320gsm paper Edition Variable l/ll 80x60cm

  • A piece of street art featuring a red figure of a person holding an umbrella with leaves and branches, while a silhouette of a seated person appears below on a white wall.

    Falling Light (2023) Two

    Unique Monotype print with linocut and mixed media on Canson Edition 320gsm paper Edition Variable ll/ll 80x56cm

  • Black and white abstract artwork of a person hanging sideways, with wings made of feathers on the person and holding strings attached to feathers.

    Above & Beyond (2023)

    Unique Monotype print with linocut and mixed media on Canson Edition 320gsm paper 80x60cm

Artist notes:

To float is to fly. If we never fly, we never fall. And yet, who does not long to fly? Even falling is a kind of flight. Falling light.

The question of how gravity - the action of gravity on the body - effects our sense of who we are, our sense of what is and isn’t possible.

How it shapes our experience of our selves and the world around us.

How then would we experience ourselves with/without gravity?

What would our relationship to the external world be in the absence of gravity?

Who would we be? Falling light.