This text was written to accompany my Grad Show at AAL June 2023. It describes how I make in the mode of drawing and what drawing allows me to investigate in my practice:

Gather:

Bring together and take in from scattered places or sources.

Draw and hold together (Fabric or part of a garment) by running thread through it.

Infer, understand.

The work presented, wether in two or three dimensions, is all made within the mode of drawing.

Works on paper are perhaps more traditionally aligned to drawing but I also consider my three dimensional work to be expanded drawing - which has departed the edges of the page and moved into space.

Drawing is an investigative process for me.  It allows me to poke around, scratch the surface and pull out understanding of an idea, or experience, or object.  It allows me to literally get my thoughts out on paper (or into space) and to reconsider them.  With drawing I am able to be in haptic dialogue with, surface, material, line and mark.

Scattered places:

I have drawn inspiration from various locations with these works:

Memory, haptic and spatial

Architecture

Language

Rural environment where twine is used to hold hay and straw together and also for impromptu repairs.

A woodland, a tree canopy.  Where the gaps between the leaves have a part to play within the overall system.

Craft practices, such as tailoring, jewellery making, and weaving.

Draw and hold together:

I have used line in its graphite form, string form, fabric form, metal form, elastic form, and as a thread.  Lines have been joined together and cuts made into surface.  I have wound and woven fabric together.  Shape and the surface qualities of materials are considered and combined.  Taking materials from their once flat beginnings, I have drawn them into new forms or arranged them into new configurations.

My works hold together the encounters I have had with materials.  Likening my process to building a language, or having similarities with poetry and writing, I have built an anthology, a collection of physical poems about drawing.  This anthology is a way of holding ideas, collecting them, while they wait to find another form or reformat.

Infer, understand:

Making drawings garners material intelligence.  Spending time with each material has allowed me to know more about its properties: how it can be shaped, bent or woven. How marks sit on a surface or are absorbed has informed decisions.

My process has enabled recollection of old memories. Particular reminders of materials stored as haptic memory. A rusty yellow car or a painted cathedral wall for example have come back into mind.  In extending the line (and containing it), working between two and three dimensions, I have considered spacial understanding as something that is nuanced and personal to each of us.

Drawing in different ways has informed my practice and opened possibilities to new explorations.