My drawings are concerned with time and narrative. They reference a range of sources, including literature, film and theatre. A sense of place is important, and the idea of encounters between the real and the imagined, people and objects. Recently, in response to print and photographic archives, I’ve been developing found images into drawings that combine documentary and personal memory. A form of semi fictional visual poetry.
I love the quietness and simplicity of drawing on paper. While making drawings, the surface might be covered with a single painted colour.Once dry, it is drawn into with conté and crayon, worked, re worked, scratched and erased to become a setting for themes of mortality, news events, dispossession, or the mundane fragments of my own life.
The relationship between drawing and photography fascinates me – photography as a springboard to different stories. Sometimes the photographs are found in archives, sometimes I use my own.There’s an alchemy, a mystery, in turning one image into another, with a distinct new meaning. While looking at photographs, ideas are unlocked intuitively: a buried obsession, a meeting between the historical and political, or a collision between the past and present. The important thing is the effect it has had on the imagination, whether triggered by an incidental subjective detail (as in Roland Barthes’ Punctum) a powerful atmosphere, or an association sparked from memory.
When starting a new piece, I’m not always conscious of what I want it to say. The meaning emerges slowly while working through doubts and changes of direction. I try to record the passing of time and capture a contemporary sense of awe and anxiety, melancholy and uncertainty – both ancient and modern.
The stillness of Piero della Francesca, the humanity of Giotto, Carpaccio, Fra Angelico and William Blake are special influences. The poetic voice in films by Tarkovsky, Kentridge and Glazer are important, the power of place and loneliness in work by Edward Hopper, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and WG Sebald, the humour, sadness and strangeness of Pina Bausch Tanztheater and the monumentality of Wagner.