Automatic Doodles 1998 - 2021.
My work tracks domestic activities such as watching movies, listening to music and interacting with my family. Many thousands of drawings were produced responding to ever changing ideas, thoughts and scenes. The spontaneous story boards are produced as if directing my own imagined movie, with the spectator being invited to decipher narratives within. The linear time-based act of viewing a movie, listening to music or having a conversation is transformed into a topographical trace. Although the doodles appear to be random I impose restraints on size, timescale and tools working within a modernist grid. In the past I referred to modernism, abstraction and colour field painting but increasing I am freeing up and using automatism in a more figurative way to explore portraiture.
Exhibitions included: Domestic Doodles Sackville Gallery London , Drawings on Time Modern Art Oxford 2000, Channel Surfing Alsager Gallery Manchester and Kings Lynn Art Centre.
Rings: Unity Video 4 mins 2007-2009
dimensions variable
Exhibited at the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2007 and 53rd Venice Biennale with Celeste Prize 2009
Rings reflects a refinement of my on going experimentation in automatic drawings produced by setting parameters of time, scale, format and drawing tools. The video records the action of my hand attempting to make a drawing, with the silver rings influencing movement and mark-making. The resulting silver deposits left on the surface trace my hands movement. The cropped format and recording in real time turn the whole action into the art object: the screen becomes the support and containing frame. As much as referencing Modernism's concerns with the refinement of form and content, I am just as interested in the references to marital rings, play and the creationist myth of god's hand creating the word - with his knuckles! Rings designed by Ruth Rignall (RCA)