Everyone knows the power of things:

life is solidified in them,

more immediately present than

in any one of its instants.

         

 

I draw, even the work that ends up not being a drawing starts as a drawing, for me drawing is imagination. There is something about the line on paper that draws you in, it is so closely linked to the hand of the artist, the labour and skill seem so near the surface. I like its simplicity and universality, it is a reduction, just paper and pencil; the rest is me.  It is so obviously not real but somehow it is strongly rooted in realness.

My practice is concerned with the power of the drawn image, in its potential to act as an external locus for internal desire, and in our ability to use its properties to fill or satisfy emotional gaps within us. It touches on the properties of objects, the power of the image and the qualities of the drawn line and how the drawn image can act as Sartre’s analogon or Proust’s madeleine.

The anthropologist Daniel Miller has studied our relationship with objects in societies across the world, they frame our lives, invisibly giving it structure and shaping how we interact, defining us, allowing us to celebrate and to grieve, anchoring us to our past.

We imbue them with the ability to comfort and reassure and we use them to traverse time and space to revisit the past or to conjure up the presence of a loved one.

 All of us will own something whose value to you far exceeds its material one, your grandfather’s watch, a childhood toy or holiday souvenir.

Would drawing it change it?

What about that thing you have lost, or desired but never possessed, that belonged to another life, would drawing it change your sense of loss.

To have an effect does something have to be true, original, and authentic?

I am giving my imagination and memory a materiality that can then be perceived my others and myself, and can be reviewed. Constructing an alternative future, and past, that is founded on objects yet in which they are removed to reveal my truth.

So much of what is accepted and used as a framework for both our personal lives and our wider society is based on belief, what is accepted as the truth is not some fixed unchanging state rather something that can evolve and change. I want to loosen our ties with reality. It is a subtle untying; I am not a revolutionary, just a relaxing of the joint between fact and fiction to create a fissure that my work can inhabit.