"I studied for my degree in London and consequently ended up spending five years away from Cornwall. I deliberately moved away from the coast to experience a different way of life"

John Dyer frames education not merely as academic attainment but as a geographical and existential displacement. London becomes both a destination and a catalyst, drawing him away from the tidal rhythms and luminous horizons of Cornwall into a dense, metropolitan weave of cultures, noise, and pace. The phrase “consequently ended up” suggests a chain of cause and effect: the pursuit of a degree naturally extends into a longer immersion, an apprenticeship to urban life beyond the curriculum. Yet there is no sense of drift; he underscores agency, “deliberately moved away”, as if distance itself is a method.

The coast functions as a shorthand for rootedness, continuity, and a certain clarity of light and space that Cornish artists often prize. Departing from it is not a rejection but a strategic unsettling. To “experience a different way of life” is to test one’s inherited perspectives, to diversify the textures of perception. The city offers geometry instead of horizon, verticality rather than the wide aperture of the sea, human crowds in place of open water. Its palette is asphalt and glass, neon and shadow; its tempo compresses time. Within that compression, character and craft are tempered.

Five years marks a formative span, long enough for habits to change, for nostalgia to sharpen into insight rather than sentimentality. Distance renders home legible. By stepping away, Dyer cultivates a binocular vision: one eye attuned to Cornish light, the other trained by London’s edges and energies. Such dual focus can deepen an artist’s language, enabling a synthesis where coastal clarity meets urban complexity.

His move reads as an ethic of curiosity and a discipline of perspective. It acknowledges that identity is not a static inheritance but a dialogue between place and journey. Returning, implicitly, would then mean returning not to the same Cornwall, but to one reframed by experience, carrying new angles with which to see the old shore.