JAPANESE MAPLE

This print inherits and modifies Julia Kristeva’s writing about Time from the perspective of motherhood and reproduction.

This work explores Cyclical time and its biological rhythm made visible by the changing seasons.

This double-plate photogravure with random monoprint layers is a celebration through shape, shadow, colour and seasonal abundance juxtaposed against the image of slimy wet tarmac – the final fate of the glory of Autumn.

It also stands as a tribute to the poem, of the same name, by the late Clive James.

Japanese Maple by Clive James

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colours will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

‘Japanese Maple’ appears in Clive James’s collection, Sentenced to Life.