Graphite powder, 6 pencils, A3 300gsm paper, A4 tracing paper, rulers (plastic 30cm and metal 45cm), black and white acrylic paint, 4 paint brushes, Photomount, Pritt Stick, camera and card reader (I couldn’t find the connecting cable – argh), pencil sharpener, fixative, 2 half filled sketchbooks, Frog Tape (amazing stuff), gloss acrylic varnish, 2 sheets of fluorescent paper, 3 sheets of metallic card, scalpel, drawing ink (black, white, violet and crimson), 2 dusters (1 clean, 1 dirty), tape measure, overalls and studio shoes (both grimy and embarrassing but I don’t feel right working without them).
Everything I have packed to take to the Centre for Drawing.
The past week has been hectic, which to be honest is the same as most weeks; show installing, teaching, PV visiting, studio time, admin, writing, social engagements, family things etc. These are all great things to be doing – except maybe the admin – but balancing so many activities at once does unfortunately compromise the amount of time there is for focused and sustained periods to reflect on and develop an art practice. Consequently, I often find myself engaged in an enduring dialogue about my work in my own head, more often than not in the least appropriate situations, in an attempt to maintain a continual and unbroken relationship with my practice. I’m not sure how productive these internal conversations are, where ideas are moved back and forth, plans are made and recent sketches are deemed futile, as such one person conversations are often rather exhausting. I was very relieved to recently discover through a conversation with friends that I’m not the only person in a constant, silent cycle of personal artistic interrogation. I was beginning to worry…
I know I’m also not alone in juggling so many responsibilities and projects, it does appear to be the life of most artists. However, attaining more consistent time in a studio environment is one of the luxuries I will be afforded during the forthcoming residency at the Centre for Drawing, and something I feel very lucky to have offered to me. It’s not often that I get successive full days to work and yet I know how important it is to have this time to explore, play, test and evaluate what I make. Although it’s not a long time for a residency, I’m sure the two weeks period will be a productive experience that proves significant in the opportunity it offers for a more contemplative approach to making work, rather than what sometimes feels like a hit and run approach to being in the studio.
The good news about my busy week is that I’ve finished off a number of projects, leaving a few days next week clear to get into the studio and prepare for my move to the project space at the Centre for Drawing. Exciting.
New Year, new projects and a small leap into the unknown…
As 2013 gets underway my forthcoming residency at the Centre for Drawing feels very timely, a short but focused period of activity in which to produce new work that may define a direction for the rest of the year. In order to move forward I’ve been doing a certain amount of reflection, which has allowed me to delineate my starting point for the project. I’ve looked back at recurring themes in my recent work and isolated an ongoing area of investigation that will, I hope, be served well by the opportunity to work in a new physical environment.
I have an interest in questioning and redefining architectural spaces, paying particular attention to the interrogation of an area through the drawn line. I often make drawings in response to material placed within a defined space, for example using ink on paper, tape on walls, stretched yarn or reflected light to mark, traverse or change an environment. My forthcoming residency at the Centre for Drawing will offer the exciting prospect of a new space to react to and work in outside of the familiar flat white walls of my studio.
It’s rather uncharacteristic of me not to plan things exhaustively in advance, but I’m striving to generate an honest response to the studio at the Centre for Drawing. Therefore, I am entering the residency without a specific strategy, proposing only to respond to, test and intervene in the architectural language of the space without imposing an existing aesthetic or methodology onto the work I make. In practice I don’t yet know what this will involve, which at this point is equally exciting and unsettling. I have visited the residency studio a number of times but recently it has been undergoing a period of renovation in preparation for the relaunch of the Centre for Drawing this year. I’ve been told that various new architectural features have been revealed during this process, and I’m willing to rise to the challenge of exploring the environment and developing an individual drawn language through which to approach it – no matter how nerve racking working without a plan may be.
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.
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