I am very excited to have been invited to exhibit my work at Painters + Collection 2021, at Nakata Museum, Japan. 21 artists from Japan, Korea, Mexico and the UK are showing work alongside the museum’s collection of 19th and 20th-century paintings, curated by Yuko Kunichika.
Rather like the singular activity of drawing in sketchbooks, cross-stitch as activity and pastime has made even more sense during lockdown. The last few months have allowed me to review the Sampler series – a body of stitched works using variegated threads, initially shown in 2018. Lockdown has enabled me the opportunity to experiment with different colour palettes and investigate the potential for further work using cross-stitch and space-dyed thread as a tool for translating ideas around memory and and recoding.
Above: Sampler, work in progress.
Sketchbooks are an intrinsic and integral part of my practice, a place where I collate, record and synthesize viewed and remembered experiences.
I am currently obsessed with comicbook-like hieroglyphs, in search of or potentially reliant on a visual equivalent to the Rosetta Stone, combining the recognized, the invented and the possible. These draw from a range of real and imagined destinations and cultural references, many from regular visits to China.
New work in progress, drawings and prints developed from recent journeys in China.
As part of the South East Open Studios. Over two weekends 15-18 and 22-25 June, showing alongside Heather Haythornthwaite and Sarah King at the Hazelnut Press.
The first UK exhibition of the Trace Engines project, which included a solo exhibition of drawings and mono prints at the AIP Gallery, Redtory Art Zone, Guangzhou in 2015, opens on the 25th November 2016 at the Rochester Art Gallery, Kent.
The private view is on the 24th November from 6:30pm and there will also be a series of workshops and artist’s talks that accompany the exhibition. This current show, from 24.11.16 to 20.02.17, brings together new work and pieces produced during my residency in China.
‘Trace Engines is a series of amalgamated drawings that on the one hand suggest a design or plan for something to come, and on the other seem like the residue of something that has already been. In this, they constitute a process of mediation where the acts and media of their creation – the drawing, tracing and mono printing – become iterative expressions that model an as yet unknown object.’
Reflecting on the China sketchbook, looking at the drawings and key images of a pivotal three-week period leading up to the Trace Engines show. People watching in cafes, evening meals with friends and dramatic flying fish all contained within the scrawled memories of South China.
Initial series of drawings investigating the potential of established language in the tradition of the portrait bust, silhouette and momento mori. The drawings are a combination of images and graphic systems taken from a range of sources.
