I winced at the thought about using fairy liquid as a medium to pour onto paper. I find it ironic as a material because it’s clean, in the sense that it’s free of bacteria, and its function is to clean dishes and cutlery, yet its texture is icky and provokes disgust when the substance touches the skin.

It’s also about the tension of something comfortably pristine and being disgusted by something repulsive. I came across Helen Chadwick, who was a sculptor. She worked with polarities of the subjects e.g. life/death, inside/outside the body, and I think seductive/repulsive was one of the subjects she dealt with in her works.

I’ve also been looking at Cy Twombly’s drawings and paintings. He used automatic drawing as a process to develop his paintings, translated as loose brush strokes on the canvas. I’m going to use it as a template or method to distribute fairy liquid onto paper. This is what I’m going to do when I’m next in the studio. I think I’ll test the pieces on different types of A4 paper to see how fairy liquid behaves on the surfaces. Then I’ll work with a roll of 1.5m (width) paper.