Road Drawing

Literature and music are full of references to roads and journeys; the road less travelled, life as one big road and so on. During lockdown, unable to move very far, I decided to re-visit a travel journal I kept while in Mexico and Guatemala and combine a number of images with roads into one large, abstract tapestry. The work was inspired by Cubism, specifically Juan Gris and George Braque, and by the textile work of Sonia Delaunay, and I based the composition on the Pan-American Highway, which is nearly 48,000km long, and full of shapes, textures and lines. I chose the metaphor of a road to reference life as a journey and all the terrain we have to navigate. I wanted to make marks that alluded to a landscape and go in different directions but somehow also work as a whole. This piece has no right way up, referencing the different possibilities we have. I chose tapestry because I wanted to experiment with this medium, use it in a painterly manner and challenge stereotypes often associated with textile art. It is a piece that I hope the viewer will enjoy contemplating and that it will be open to many interpretations.