My artwork has taken a number of directions in various two- and three-dimensional media, in a range of sizes and techniques, with a recurring preoccupation with drawing, both as marks and observation, with subjects that reference the figure, objects and place being most prevalent.
I have completed a year as a selected artist participant in the Royal Drawing School (UK) Online Drawing Development Year 2025. My goal was to expand my repertoire of skills and approaches to drawing. One of my interests at the moment is to explore the reciprocal uses and effects of extending space and narrative through several simultaneous views of one scene in a single drawing. Influential sources are film, photos and art history.
Materials led my studio-based PhD in a consideration of memory that encompassed visual, tactile and bodily memory. The initial studio explorations availed of household substances such as vaseline, bacon fat, Jello gelatine, and face cream used to wrap, coat, contain and fill everyday objects to create sticky assemblages in pursuit of an articulation of memory and memory loss as materiality. This evolved into the vigorous physical actions of making rubbings/frottages of an inherited home comprising both architecture and objects, such as hallways, doors, windows as well as furniture, clothing, kitchen utensils, food, trees and landscape. The same rubbings on tracing paper were displayed as three-dimensional forms in one installation, Her Place and What Was Learned There, and as flat abstractions in another installation, Her Place- Scraps. I describe the process and final body of work, Her Place, as a ‘sensual biography of place.’ Theories of home and the domestic sphere were animated through creative writing in the voice of the inherited home, all underscored by a feminist perspective.
I am now looking to further investigate ideas that arose in this and earlier work where I incorporated multi-media, layers and moving parts with drawings and two dimensional works. Audio visual elements were incorporated with drawings using Augmented Reality; cutting up and manipulating drawings and prints by adding mechanical movement or inviting viewer interaction to move layers of drawings have been used in the past and provide germinal direction. Creative writing and text have both initiated or been part of drawings. Scale can vary, whether with graphite, charcoal, pastel or mixed media, but larger scale are the most satisfying. Architectural references are meant to captivate a psychological state.
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