I used to worry a bit that to be drawing a dragonfly, or magnified fish scale as I sat by a remote river was perhaps an irrelevant, even escapist activity. What is the significance or relevance of a gentle curiosity about creatures which live in air, mud and sand in a world of increasing famine, new wars and continuing ecological suicide? I realise more now that the apparently subtle manifestations of nature - “the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves”, or the choreography of walking birds on a estuarine mud flat are all a most significant measure of the state of the world. You could say that the stains on the trunk of the Mangrove tree, while drawn in an understated way with subtle nuances, are hinting at much larger forces. I hope that kind of understatement could be strongly effective when it is linked to the huge movements of tides - and the dramatic changes which will happen to billions of people whose land would be swamped as a result of global warming. I like to think that “my bits of paper with marks on them: - my works - are directly connected to the physical world where they were made. Just as the creatures of the natural world are “the canaries in the mine” so also I would like my bits of paper to be seen as Litmus papers. Litmus, which absorbs the nuances of air, or water, or honey, or the tracks of hermit crabs.’
John Wolselely, 1991