My practice stems from the innate desire to produce images from both intuitive and conceptual processes. In other words, my artistic ideas begin with a drawn, etched, cut/extracted or found image. These works are the outcome of both an intuitive drawing process and an ongoing more ‘counter-intuitive’ process of collecting images from narrative texts.
I’m also especially interested in how intuitive drawing or mark making, lends a sort of ‘zoned out’ affinity to a surface such as paper. Recently, my work has dealt with narrative archetypes and collage methodology. Max Ernst is known to have described Surrealist collage as “the fortuitous encounter of two mutually distant realities upon a non-suitable plane”. These cut and extracted visual symbols, when merged together, form new two-dimensional realities and stories. The Illustrated Chapters forces a number of ‘cut-out’ teenage characters together in a diagonal montage. Each of the figures derives from a different setting/page - thus representing varied moments in the narrative story. It was also in this artwork that, intuitive mark making materialised in the formation of a kind of muted speech - as the droplet type marks replace any presence of printed text and dialogue between characters. Whereas Boys Trick Secrets and Faye’s Skiing Success/Poland by Night are the result of further experimentation with fundamental processes and materials namely - image collection, extraction/cutting and two-dimensional layering. These works lend themselves to the act of narration, the protagonists or central figures are present but they are also obscured by their own disjointed and mysterious visual profiles.
