Trying to figure out where your work fits in, where it should be shown and who your contemporaries are can be minefield of confusion! I’ve decided to continue with what I’m doing for now and worry about all of this at a later stage when my work is more developed. Maybe there won’t be a neat category that my work will fit into, and does this matter?
I’ve been exploring drawing through my work on paper, on clay, and also through reading critical writing about drawing. There has been some really beautiful writing about drawing in the introduction to the book ‘Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing’:
“Drawing offers us the most extraordinary range of possibilities: it is a map of time recording the actions of the maker. It is as Michael Newman writes a record of ‘lived temporality’, and in the sense that a drawing is by essence always incomplete. A line always suggests a continuation and infinitum and thus connects us with infinity and eternity. A drawing enjoys a direct link with thought and with an idea itself. It’s very nature is unstable, balanced equally between pure abstraction and representation.” (Emma Dexter, p. 10)
This extract expresses a lot of ideas that I have concerning both drawing and sculpture albeit in a more considered way. Drawing is a very pure form of expression and perhaps this is why when I’ve chosen to work with ceramics I’ve used a black and white palette in order to exploit this pure quality.
