‘The thing you see first,’ she said, with the faintest suggestion of a smile, ‘that’s never what it really is. What you see next, that’s the tip of it. See how it dances; fades like the sky. The way it becomes. All this flotsam. The line of the tide. This against that. It’s where you stop. And where you begin.’

I was starting to understand.

‘Can you see it,’ she whispered; ‘what came before?’ She continued, almost too softly to hear. ‘And there: what is beyond.’

The Ink Said

My technique uses ink, fluid acrylics and alcohol on yupo paper, plastic and aluminium substrates. It’s a bit like chromatography – each pigment is made up of many different colours, which combine and dry in unique ways. I scan the final images at high resolution and enlarge them up to ten times their original size to reveal crisp detail, silky textures and fascinating micro-worlds.

My inkscapes explore the transition between boundaries and intimacy; what it means to yield and to resist; to begin and end. Colour and shape can trigger this amazing emotional response. You can feel immediately drawn to the angle of a contour; the softness of a line; the texture in a red, for example. And you feel at home there: it makes sense to you, without even trying.

When art feels too deliberate or overworked, it doesn’t speak to me. That’s why I love using pigments in this free, organic way. I feel as if I’m getting closer to nature, to the messy rawness of feeling and being and the stories at the core of us all. That’s how the image finds its voice.

Gabrielle Turner is a writer and artist who lives in Surrey, UK. After many years working as a freelance content strategist in the technology sector, she was inspired to change direction and pursue her passion for the creative arts. As a linguist by education, her work continues to explore themes closely related to language: communicating meaning, understanding the self, and the spaces between us.

Her project ‘the ink said’ brought together art and writing in a collection of 100 flash fiction stories inspired by the colour and shapes of her inkscapes. A selection are available as limited edition prints.  Her fiction work has most recently been published in Popshot magazine and The Emma Press Book of Beasts.