The artist:
My name is Lauren and I attempt to make beautiful things, failing that I have beautiful ideas.
This is a drawing of a bend in the River Tyne. I grew up visiting my grandparents who lived nearby the river. When I visited, we would walk this landscape. We’d follow the rivers curve on a worn path made by our previous journeys. I have memories of using the leaves as umbrellas when I was still small enough to shelter under them. I can see in my mind’s eye the shadow of my grandfather’s dog between the trees as we walked along. The footpath had one wooden plank so embedded in the landscape either bluebells or snowdrops depending on the season would grow through the woods grain. The plank bridged a tiny stream that trickled into the river.
I first heard the title of my drawing when I was at the beach watching a father with his two boys as they attempted to traverse a stream that had made a gully in the sand. One boy hesitated after his brother; his foot hovered as he went to step onto a driftwood bridge his father had placed over the stream for him to cross ‘Walk past the bridge Edmund’.