About

As a chronic insomniac in her youth, wandering between the realms of conscious and unconscious, Purdey Fitzherbert has remained inexplicably drawn to the concept of the edge – the edge between hidden and revealed, nature and humanity, creation and destruction, life and death. In her multi-layered, intricate, and elaborate compositions the artist weaves the power of natural forces into the stories of humanity’s past. Having struggled with her condition for years, Purdey found the support and guidance she needed in alternative medicine practices. Studying energy-based healing techniques like Reiki, or complex herbal and mineral compounds used in Ayurveda, the artist developed a deep fascination and appreciation for nature’s healing powers. The idea of rebirth and the flow and the transformation of energy from the Earth and everyday objects into the human mind was the original nourishment for her artistic development.

Purdey’s compositions are expeditions into the boundaries of drawing practices and the extremes to which the materials can be pushed in order to discover new pathways and possibilities. Her large-scale works are visual symphonies of layers of drawings made on thin yet incredibly resilient Japanese paper, assembled through time, bringing together different methods of artistic creation. Purdey predominantly works with a specific type of Japanese paper that she came across a few years ago. A “rebellious” material with a “feeling of warmth” has become an ideal foundation for the artist’s experiments. The paper’s natural qualities and its versatility make up a receptive medium while the artist’s familiarity with the paper empowers her to push it further and further every time. Purdey’s smaller scale assemblages can be viewed as ‘spirit captures’ of a city, or of a moment of her past. There, layers of paper are intercepted by found objects, the artist’s brushes, or traces of natural world – “different little stories caught in them”. Through reappropriating forgotten, thrown out and abandoned items that Purdey gathers during her long walks, the artist delves further into the idea of rebirth through restoration and revival of the past. Whether it’s bullets from the World War I period she found on a beach or an old wrapper she picked up off the streets of London, each object tantalizes the imagination as part of a hidden story that may, or, most likely, will never be fully uncovered.

Relinquishing dominance and control are an integral part of Purdey’s creative process. In order to make Nature her collaborator, the artist learned to accept a role of facilitator, a conduit through which pigments, chemicals and natural forces come in contact on a single piece of paper, initially grappling for dominance, but eventually embracing each other in a unique collaboration. The salt water’s density or fresh water’s purity act as a unifying force for the materials, responding differently in the midst of the winter’s frost, or summer’s fresh breeze, or the incandescence of a heatwave – each piece of paper created by the artist bears the weight of the atmospheric conditions it was conceived in. In a further effort to remove the hand of the artist from her creations, Purdey accentuates the natural patterns created by the interactions of the chemicals and the pigments by using a swivel knife to cut around the shape within the drawings. Each created sheet of paper then becomes a unique footprint of a moment in the artist’s life, absorbing the energy of the creator’s emotional and physical state in that moment, and reflecting that energy into the final pattern. These moments, impossible to reproduce or even emulate – one cannot repeat the past – embody the singularity and the preciousness of Purdey’s works on paper.

For the artist, each creation tells a story, each piece of paper brings a memory into the work, and each found object comes with the undiscovered past; therefore, although the creations are not conventionally figurative, Purdey does not necessarily perceive herself as an abstractionist. She strives to inspire a sense of wonder and curiosity in her viewer, and she welcomes the associations and the mental interconnections that can be inspired by her works. Mesmerised by both urban and rural landscapes, Purdey attempts to abate the distance between Nature and Humanity and reveal the harmony and the inherent beauty of their everyday interactions.