Postcard series Collage

Literally drawing in, into and on the physical environment, my mark-making develops the interrelation of sculpture, found object and artist with the material world, and provides a means to decipher my own impulses and needs. For me the personal is wholly integrated with creative practice as I give tangible form to my obsessions and emotions. Natural characteristics, repetitive impulses and orderly tendencies resonate throughout my visual language. Associating these with the balance of the controlled and uncontrolled, conscious and unconscious, innate and attained, led the path of my research to Neuroscience. Studying these notions, I have been concerned with what really happens, in terms of physiology and cognition, when we make or respond to art and the universality of 'art as behaviour' . My work arises from the multiple roles, activities and environments of my everyday life and deals with motherhood, gender, abjection and the body. The 'hairification' pieces reference instinct, body, gender behaviour and abject reflexive responses and derive from a maternal role, nit combing. Neither fully dead nor fully alive, hair has made the journey from inside to out. Pared down to varnish and a few hairs, I tend to the waste hair my body has shed, my extended attention gives it new form and value. The meditative action of using something of myself in this way, combines the intimate with the public, the fragility of self with the fragility of culture. The value of time and the implicit weight of time and effort taken in making is a central tenet of my practice. It is the temporal qualities of making that allow it to transcend multiple generations and cultures. I laboriously control unwilling materials to create works that are nevertheless quickly absorbed by the eye, exploring the temporal dichotomy. Automatic intuitive traits seem amplified when limiting myself to the most basic process and product, drawing and line, a surface and a sharp instrument. I become a gestural recording instrument for my body and the space around it, combining a sense of centering and escapology simultaneously. The hand grasps the physicality of thought , turning it into subtle, highly intricate, embossed images. Both concave and convex, the intricate patterns spread and creep, territorialising the thick white paper and evolving from page to page.