For two weeks at the end of January 2013 I will be a resident artist at the Centre for Drawing (CfD), University of the Arts London (http://thecentrefordrawingual.com). The centre was established to encourage the scholarly and imaginative exploration of the boundaries of drawing and is based at Wimbledon College of Arts, where I will be working in the CfD project space for the duration of the residency. This blog will record my activities and thoughts while working in the Centre for Drawing.
Drawing is now central to my practice, in recent years my work has developed to involve systematic drawing methods and an interrogation of the generation of lines. For many years I worked with a camera, producing images that became increasingly digital and synthetically processed. For me, the work and its wider context within the realm of digital photography developed into something frustratingly intangible – where the contents of the image remained untouchable within encoded bits of information, locked inside a computer screen. I have returned to drawing over the last three years as a means of reconnecting with the physical process of making work, the tactility of the drawn surface and the sensual experience of making marks over a sustained period of time. My recent drawings explore the liminal space in between technology and tradition, chance and control; drawings are generated using or mimicking mechanical processes but bear the characteristic traces of my hand upon the drawing surface, and the inconsistencies that leaves, exploring the relationship between autographic rendering and the visual language of mechanical reproduction. In some works marks are made on photocopiers to become the source material for intricate hand-drawn works, such as Signal to White Noise Ratio (2010), and in others analogue drawing methods suggest the image traces left by mechanised technologies such as the repetitively generated lines in ink jet printing, Praxis (2012).
In 2006 I completed a PhD in Fine Art Theory and Practice, which explored notions of the interior space in art and its relationship to The Uncanny. At the point of finishing the PhD I found myself feeling more connected with the textual positioning of the work I was making than the formal aspects of making the work itself. Recently I have tried to unpick my practice to allow a greater engagement with materials and processes. At times this feels like I have started from scratch with a different set of objectives to make work, which has been both frustrating and creatively liberating. In many ways my practice feels quite young and in a state of flux – but maybe this is how many practices feel regardless of how established they are. What I’m ultimately most excited about is the renewed purity and honesty of the work, which at present relies less on contextual theories and more on the physical experience of the work and how it is made. The re-evaluation of my practice and a shift towards a focus on drawing coincided with me moving into a studio space that allowed me the luxury of a space to work in and a physical environment to react to and test out ideas. I have come to realise how important space is to my practice, and this is something that I hope to explore further during my time at the Centre for Drawing. I am entering the residency without a pre-defined set of objectives for what I will make, but moreover hope to respond to the physical and experiential aspects of being in a new and unfamiliar space. As my preparations for the residency and my time at CfD progress I’ll post details of my activities and thoughts on this blog.
