In the beautiful Oxford Botanic Gardens, I was sitting in rosy sunshine contemplating the possibility of using plant dyes in painting. A core colour in my artwork is the dark steely blue of indigo, and, yes, there was an indigo plant in the gardens. A helpful gardener showed me where to find it -and in flower (below right), although it’s the leaves that make the dye.

Walking home I passed a pen shop and noticed that it sells ink in a range of delicious colours. There was no indigo but I came away with the beautifully named Midnight Blue to try out.

I love using ink on wet watercolour paper - as it spreads, it creates unexpected forms and weird edges. It also changes colour as it dilutes into the wetness of the paper. Black India Ink dilutes to shades of grey that verge on browns

Midnight Blue lets loose its underlying colours, revealing a vibrant turquoise and a surprising pink.

This contingent emergence of form and colour fascinates me. I prepare the surface, allow the conditions, then the ink does its thing. I can adjust the process to a limited degree by tilting, adding or subtracting water.

As I get to understand what a new material can do, a dialogue starts with earlier work as I think back to past paintings and processes for possible new ways to work. I wondered what would happen on a disrupted surface, and over handwriting. AT the top of this post is the outcome. I wrote out the opening words from and Iris Murdoch’s text (The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts, 1967) on to thick watercolour paper, ripped them and glued them randomly to construct an almost 3d surface. Then I experimented with Midnight Blue ink spreading on this disrupted surface. This step draws on the word-collaging technique I developed 6 years ago in Berlin Notes in the Dark. That technique was used on a larger scale in the series Other People. In those paintings, pairs or groups of people engaged in unheard dialogue, their individual stance and the space between them conveying something of their relationship. You can see both series on this page by scrolling down.

The final step was reducing the insistence of the words with a layer of white paint on some sections..