I have been quiet and busy. Fueled by a trip home to Scotland taking in Skye, Fife, Oban and my home county which has the inspiring welcome sign "Clackmannanshire - more than you imagine" or as I like to say "not as crap as you thought." I love it actually, hills, moss, trees with pokey holes; it's not vast, I enjoy it on a micro scale, the details and textures.
"Treasure Maps" is my new large drawing in progress. It is approximately 3m x 1.5m and drawn in archival pen on Fabriano 300g/m paper. Nets growing around patterns create a strange coming together of organic and geometric forms, like maps of an ancient alien civilization.
The base patterns for this drawing are taken from shards of pottery that I unearthed in my parents' garden as a child. I'm an obsessive hunter of tiny things, I blame Where's Wally. My sister and I used to search for golf balls in Dollar Glen and after those started to run dry my obsession turned to broken bits of patterned china. I liked to imagine what the whole dish would have looked like, and the people who owned the dish, and what the house must have looked like inside, and how old it was, and the event that caused the dish to break and be dumped in the bottom of the garden. And so it has come to pass that I still have these broken bits and they still excite me, even thinking about it now makes me want to go home and grub around in the soil for a few hours.
I did have another countryside visit to Kent with my artist friend Naomi Press. Her mother Julia Corf is a wonderful landscape artist and print maker and lets us come and use her press. Of which more to follow. Here's a typical Natalie photo...
But here I am, back in the studio and happy to be creating work for The Other Art Fair, 24 - 27 April 2014, Ambika P3, 35 Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5LS. Come visit. I'll also be at the V&A drawing this Friday 28th Feb for the Hackney Wick takeover!
