Drawing is my default. I draw to remember things and sometimes to forget them. I draw to work things out, to record, to solve problems, to make collections and to wonder what would happen if.
I draw with pens, pencil, paint, print processes and with light.
Combining drawing with other media I can create tensions and unexpected little joys. Recently I have worked with engraved acrylic and light, a series of etchings and embroideries, collographic prints overlaid with moving film images and stories told in shadow and film. There is often a sense of urgency or immediacy reflected in my work; the edges of an animation show the “real” world around it, small sculptures appear incomplete, graphite drawings made in the dark at a theatre overlap.
My works can appear playful but carry darker and serious messages or questions. There are often veils such as fine paper, shadows, lights and physical detachment through which ideas or truths are suggested and questions are posed. Where is the balance between self-care and self-harm? Can we visit a place as if for the first time if we have been there before? Why don’t things fit back into place? My short film ‘Surface Decoration’ records the slow process of making wallpaper by hand, hanging the paper in the local built environment and documenting its incongruity, to question the relative value of craft.
I am concerned with illusion, indeterminacy, unease, a sense of unfairness, disharmony.
The strange and the eerie, the misplaced and the abandoned, captured scraps of things, of conversations on journeys, glimpses of people and places and thoughts.
I like the rescued and discarded – the un-precious, the empty.
My intentions are to invite the viewer to think new thoughts about something; to provoke an uneasy amusement.
