2007/ 09: Urban Landscapes
This series of drawings was inspired by the movement, energy, rythmns and atmosphere of the city streets; the passing of time, transcience. I used poor quality, pixelated mobile phone videos of street scenes as source material and drew from the videos or from direct observation from cafe windows. I was inspired to incorporate the sounds, phrases and thoughts arising in my mind and in the space I was recording, using lettraset text and handwriting. After this series of works, I wanted to start working on a larger scale, and the method of framing works I had often used in the past, was starting to feel restrictive. I have realised after creating these and other pictoral works of individual scenes, that my interests lie in creating narratives, and animated sequences of events, so I started to experiment with creating images on long scrolls of paper. (See Sunday Morning, Street Drawing, and Transparency).
Snowy Day 2009: This drawing was inspired by the day that I saw snow on the beach for the first time in Brighton. It was quite a surreal day. A photograph I took of people looking out to sea was the source material for this work. Busy 2009: This drawing contained the random word 'democracy', yet I did not know why I had included it and the text seemed at odds with the image. I have since found that my desire to make work about power relationships and political democracy has manifested in the recent work, 'Transparency', 2010. Seagulls, Echo, Dissolve, Meeting Place, City Limit, 2009: These works were all inspired by places in the city in which I live. Using tracing paper offered a fragile, delicate quality to the works, which I found out was a material I wanted to pursue working with, as I felt it referenced the themes of transient moments of time. However, on framing, Seagulls, in a frame with a mount, I realised that the translucent, fragile quality was lost, so I framed, Dissolve in a floating frame without a mount. Scatterbrain 2008: 'The energy of people passing through city streets; fleeting glances, overheard snippets of conversation- the view from the window flashes by like a television screen'. Passing By 2008: Drawings of people passing by my window in the rush hour of the day. Your Smile Made My Day/ Gave You Glances/ I Saw You 2008: Drawings inspired by phrases from the 'Lovestruck' love letter pages of a free London newspaper in which admirers write in to send their message, in an attempt to make contact with the people they have seen, often on the tube train.
Photographic and experimental installation drawing work: inspired by the movement of crowds within urban spaces. Installation created at Camberwell College of Art interim show, 2007/08, (yr 1, p/t MA Drawing, before transfering to Wimbledon for yr 2, 2009/10).
Using the method of tracing is often re-visited in my drawing practice. I used this method in the Chip Shop drawings, 2000, and have returned to it again, in the latest work, Transparency.
