During the lockdown, I started experimenting with a material I normally use only occasionally: ink.

This series of 17 drawings was made with Chinese ink and bister — a walnut-based ink that I made myself from the walnuts of my own tree. I was fascinated by the way the material could take over. Instead of drawing an image in the traditional sense, I allowed the ink to flow, spread, bleed, dissolve and settle on the paper. I used water, sponges, fingers and whatever the moment suggested.

There was very little intervention from the mind. The drawings seemed to develop a life of their own.

The work of Gao Xingjian, Nobel Prize-winning writer and artist, was an important inspiration, as were the freedom and immediacy of East Asian ink painting. Nature appears in the works, but not as something observed and reproduced. It emerges intuitively — sometimes as landscape, sometimes as vegetation, sometimes as something mysterious or almost mystical.

What began as an experiment became a series of 17 works. I was so struck by the depth and texture of the originals that I had them professionally reproduced using a high-quality 3D printing process that captures the physical texture of the ink on the paper.

Each work is available as a signed edition of 10.

Ink & Bister is perhaps the closest I come to drawing without drawing: allowing material, chance and intuition to meet on the page.