statement

I regard drawing as a thinking process, as an attempt to make sense of the world I see around me. For example, one of my regular practices is to draw in public places– shopping areas, transport terminals, city streets–places that many people pass through. In most of these locations I am positioned within the crowd, as part of it. Drawings are made within a limited amount of time using ball-point pen on tracing paper. These tools restrict the drawing to line, with no possibilities for erasure. Beyond this there are no rules–a line can follow the trajectory of someone's movement, trace an outline or mark the direction of a glance.

In contrast to the indiscriminate collection of data by the lens of a camera, this is a selective and creative process. The drawing is a means of following complex sensory experience. Hesitant linear marks are made on the basis of slippery and uncertain memories. The drawings fail to capture‚ expressions, faces, bodies and relationships between people, as I see them advancing towards me or receding from view. Fragmented impressions of individual bodies are drawn into a collective figure–the crowd–not as an accurate mapping exercise but as a process of improvisation in which a number of strategies are attempted. Once I have made several of these drawings in the same location, from the same perspective, I bring them together to produce a single layered image–an amalgamation of these short-lived drawing experiments.

bio

born:1964, UK

education:

Leeds Metropolitan University, PhD, 2010
Leeds Metropolitan University, MA Fine Art, 2000
Leeds Polytechnic, BA (Hons) Graphic Design, 1991

selected publications

SAGE Handbook of Digital Dissertations and Theses; Digits and Figures. SAGE, 2011 (forthcoming)
/seconds, online publishing project; Things that Move, Issue 6, 2007
TRACEY Online Journal of Contemporary Drawing Research; Out of Hand, 2004

selected solo or two-person exhibits

Project Space Leeds: Inverted Garden, Leeds, UK, 2010
Drawing Spaces: De-skill Re-skill, Lisbon, Portugal, 2008
Alsager Arts Centre Gallery: Drawn Over, Alsager, UK, 2007