My paintings are rooted in the borderlands of South Shropshire — a landscape of ancient woodland, historical conflict and literary resonance that I have been returning to for thirty years. What began as direct encounter with a specific place has gradually become something else: an imagined territory, carried in memory and transformed through the act of painting.

The Mortimer name runs through the work as both location and myth. There is no Mortimer Lake. The landscape is increasingly fictional — invented light, impossible water, architecture half-remembered and half-dreamed. Yet the place remains emotionally real, and that tension between the observed and the imagined is where the work now lives.

The paintings place the viewer inside this landscape — enclosed by woodland, drawn toward light glimpsed through dark mass. The forest becomes what Milton made of it in Comus: a place of uncertain passage, transformation, and half-remembered significance.