Drawing with what is at hand
I draw with anything that feels like it might have a story to tell. A stick has heaps to say. Rocks have ages. Eye shadow has seen some things.
I draw with what is at hand, in place.
Sometimes I draw with both hands at once. Sometimes with one hand, or with whatever is nearby. A drawing can begin as a mark made by a plant, a snag in paper, a stain, a repeated gesture or a way of testing how a material behaves.
Drawing with plants and materials
I use botanical inks, plant matter, lichen, mushrooms, mineral residues, sticks, bark and windfall wood. A stick extends the body. Sticks and other materials bring other bodies into the drawing: a tree or plant, a stone, a discarded object or the hands that made it. Sticks are never straight. Their bends bring in time, weather, movement and form from the environment.
Drawing can happen at any stage of a work.
I work on paper, fabric, wood or whatever is available, at scales from hand and lap to body and room.
These drawings are part of the research that also feeds the material, textile and photographic work. They let me stay with a material for longer, without asking it to become a finished artwork immediately.
Drawing inside other works
Drawing can become a layer inside a photograph, a structure within a textile work, a score for movement or sound, or a way of finding the composition of an installation. Bilateral marks often move into digital works and prints on silk.
A page may sit in a book for years. A fragment may later meet a photograph, piece of cloth, carved form or sound work. Some works remain studies, informing process.
Related projects
…Early marks and small storms
As a young person, I drew invented calligraphies and strange maps of people. Those early drawings already treated a person as something that could be followed through marks, routes and fragments.
I began a drawing major at art school in 1998. It was a strange thing for me to major in because I was a mark maker, not a technical drawer. For two years of daily life drawing, I made small storms on paper. Sitters drifted off the page and lived other lives.
A lot of the works were barely visible. They were more like note-taking, sound recording with my hands, little visual poems with a secret symbolic catalogue of signs and outlines of people and places within impossible physical perspectives.