Drawing...

Drawing is pretty much the life force of everything I make. Most of the sculptural stuff comes out of drawing and the process of mark making so after the haul of the degree show I wanted to come back to some research and using drawing as a way of testing methods and rules.

The book on top is 'Afterimage: Drawing through process', it contains a ton of drawings from 24 artists including Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, Barry Le Va and Marcia Hafif who use varying (and often fairly eccentric) approaches to the idea and materiality of drawing. 

I ended up coming back to ground charcoal and repeated scattering for the first attempt...

I wanted to see what kind of geography the charcoal bits would produce through the repeated scattering so I let it build up over time. Probably one of the things I like most about doing something like this is that you can use each attempt like an investigation. Once I begin, I can only make observations without necessarily knowing what the end result is going to be. 

First Post...

I'm new to this so thinking of something fitting for my very first post took a bit of pondering. I thought I'd start by posting some of my influences over the last year.

Not easy to sum this one up in a single sentence but if you're at all interested in art, craft and its relationship to labour (and you don't mind reading a densely academic book until your forehead bleeds) then this is the book for you. 

Jill Townsley 'Spoons'. Jill Townsley is brilliant, this is her website: Jill Townsley

The Craftsman by Richard Sennett. A more forgiving read about the essence of craft and its place in society. 

Liza Lou's 'Kitchen'. Pretty much all of Lou's work entails every surface inch being painstakingly covered in beads. Dazzling, sinister and slightly mad: these are a few of the reasons I love it.

Manchester. Can't live here without it getting under your skin and in your art!