Artists
My art practice combines drawing, mixed media and printing techniques and is concerned with creating a visual translation of our everyday experiences.
I am interested in the every day. The everyday and universal complexities involved in living, and of dying. Of relationships and our communications. But also, importantly, our emotional investment in these. I ask of myself, and others "How do you feel about death and dying? What do you understand of emotions? How do they contribute to our relationships and communication and why is it that our attempts at these are, at times, so inept?" Essentially what it means to be human.
For me, drawing is the most immediate response to sensation. More immediate than cognition and certainly more immediate than language. Trying to create a visual equivalent to sensation and emotions, I find I am contemplating marks as metaphors. The body language of mark making. I wonder, what does an emotion look like? How do you summarise the largess of life into form? The meaning of death into colour? Reduce the complexity of relationships, simplify the chaos of communication with charcoal and a rubber? How do you draw understanding and non-understanding with line and shade?
Inherent in all aspects of living and dying is a pull between opposing forces. A counterbalance weighted with apparent contradictions. This dynamic moves us physically and emotionally between presence and absence, internal and external, verbal and non-verbal, resilience and frailty. A coming and going. This contract between complementary forces and elements is also reflected in the process of drawing. The spark that a tension of opposites creates relies on the interplay between space and form, areas that are worked and unworked, similar or dissimilar marks, tone and colours. Between description and abstraction, the conscious and unconscious, the known and the unknown.
