THE NAVVY CUT
 

These mixed-media works are drawn outside my boat studio - the canal becomes both subject and metaphor: a place of shimmer and squalor, myth and mess. The series culminates in The Navvy Cut, a nearly three-metre-long painting created for Canal Boat Contemporary’s cabinet, a work that sought to hold these contradictions in a single frame.
 

The canal is both romantic and raw. Its waters hold light and mystery, but also dirt, rubbish. It is a place where communities form at the edges - some by choice, living outside convention; others by necessity, surviving after falling through society’s cracks.

The Navvy Cut also carries a biographical undercurrent. My ancestor William Stevens was a 19th-century wharfinger in Guildford who built a barge named Perseverance, founding a fleet that once travelled these same waters. The canal is therefore both inheritance and present-tense reality: a scar in the land, a psychic line through time.