My primary studio activity is drawing. I have always been intrigued by the immediacy of drawing, the often obvious process of a mind and hand giving visual form to a perceived object/figure, an idea, a passing thought or emotion. Drawings can be absolutely spare, a line on a page or exhaustively rendered; they can be any size from miniature to monumental. We can make drawings with hunks of burnt wood as we have been for thousands of years or we can make them on our computers.
I'm interested in what constitutes drawing. If drawing is a mark making activity then there are many different types of lines/marks that can be thought of within the language of drawing. In my work I will consciously combine very different 'types' of drawing through collage. I'll use sections cut from the papers which cover my drawing table and where I have tested line and/or colour. These sections represent a kind of found or spontaneous drawing. I have also used text as mark, a drawn line that can carry meaning separate from what it says as the written word. I then combine these with very intentional, observational drawing of an object. It is a way of exploring the boundary between the intentional and the unintentional, the found and the closely observed, the saved and the discarded.
My work over the last several years makes allusions to the genre of scientific illustration, a highly specialized field with its own very particular history, which has survived the advent of photography owing to its ability to visually render subtle details the camera cannot capture. The drawings that comprise this body of work include botanical images based on my own garden and drawings of museum collected and catalogued bird specimens. These works do not ascribe to being "scientific illustrations" rather they comment on a shared space between science and art. The most recent work also puts image, text and collage together in a page format as either referring to a letter or a book. The work uses image as metaphor and I'm interested in ephemerality, fragility, change over time, layers and decay. I choose to work on paper with drawing media as there is a parallel between material and image, form and content. We think of paper as being fragile and vulnerable and even the best kinds of paper will degrade over time with exposure to light. My intention is to allude to an idea through image as metaphor and to have my choice of materials reinforce the meaning.
I am intrigued by the ahistorical as well as the peripheral nature of both the act of drawing and the finished product. It embodies for me a collapse of time - I can look at a line drawing on a Greek amphora vase, a 17th Century Indian Mughal drawing of battling elephants, a Rodin figure drawing and a Joseph Beuys and not feel the enormous space nor the linear distance that separates them. It is a recent notion that drawing can be an end in itself and that is where I situate my own practice. |
Pressed Lily - 2005
mixed media on paper, 25 in x 19 in
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