June 2018, during the opening night of my degree show, I was incredibly honoured and humbled to receive York St John University’s, Fine Art: Practise as Research award. The prize included an artist residency with Drawing Matters Collective at their studio.
Receiving this afforded me the time and studio space to focus on my first self-initiated project since graduating. I wanted to use this opportunity to elevate where I wanted to take my artistic practise. Before beginning the residency, my initial proposal was to delve into the subject of mental health to further inform my artwork.
Through reflecting on my practise during university and how I worked I discovered that I have a naturalistic inquiry through material play, which often developed into creating abstract forms that explore the optical effects of pattern, light and the interplay of positive and negative space, while allowing the work to grow through repetition and layering.
Fig 1) Pickett. K. (2018) Untitled
My degree show was an installation occupying a basement which the spectator had to descend into and manoeuvre through in order to engage fully and experience the art. It was through reflecting on this piece of work that I began thinking about drawing. Focusing on the linear aspect of the structures I created, I was already drawing while working three dimensionally. This gave focus as to positioning my work in terms of drawing, in keeping with the Drawing Matters residency and redefine the grounding of my work between the blurred parameters of sculpture and drawing – echoing Krauss notion of art practices becoming “infinitely malleable” (1979).
I became fascinated with a radio therapy mask, initially because it is dialectic with the structures contained in my art practise, also by its purpose to immobilize and its connection to the subtleties between physical pain and psychological pain. Initially full of energy I began researching immobilisation and incarceration, exploring body language as a means to communicate a feeling. I gathered visual research looking at body positions of Pompeii victims and artists such as Antony Gormley who works with the human figure as a motif in his work.
The focus on the human figure was preventing me from producing anything other than an inception of an idea in my mind, which set limitations on what I was producing. It was only through reflection that I was able to remember what appealed to me was the abstract structure, not the human form of the mask. Unpicking this further I found that pattern provided a consistency, not only pleasing to the eye, it gave a sense of reliability. In reading the structure there is something about a pattern that provides a sense of safety.
Inspired by my visual research of Antony Gormley’s drawings, my concept and approach to my project began to change. Faith in the working process meant it appropriate to engage with an array of mark making materials, considering their properties and enjoying their connection to expression and thinking. With consideration of Emma Dexter’s notion “to draw is to be human” (2005), I began to attempt to evoke a sense, which is often difficult to articulate using language. Through focusing on drawing and the relationship between the physical act of mark making, allowed for a more diverse exploration of qualities of gestures, that assume mood and atmosphere, resulting in a more abstract realisation.
I began to develop this idea further experimenting through different techniques,
taking the principles of drawing and allowing it to underpin the work, incorporating found materials, liberated me from the notion that drawing must be pencil on paper.
Wire was a material I was very keen to explore as it lent itself to the linear, skeletal structures of drawing while being three-dimensional. Able to translate hand drawn marks which are spiky and scribbly into wire allowed the marks to operate between the two practises and create gestures that are dialectic with angry energy. In her essay, Drawing Across and Between Media (2012), Anna Lovatt articulated Greenberg phrase ‘drawing in space’ as “literally, draw in the air with a single strand of wire”. Another use of wire that I explored was knitting, this took me back to a pattern structure, however, was incredibly tough and time consuming.
Push pull, this was all about the physical element of the mark making process, beginning with the crushing of charcoal, and then the forceful dragging of the pigment across the page by pushing and pulling it with a squeegee.
Working through this hands-on process of investigation, allowed for my gestures to become physical, capturing an abstract energy. It was the explorations on transparent plastic, that allowed for an illusion of the removal of the surface, I was able to think about drawing like I would a sculpture, in terms of being within a physical space, elevated from a surface. Thus, allowing the drawing to pop rather than sink into a surface.
Relying on a certain element of chance, I was able to create flowing marks, using marbles, because of the spherical form they have the ability to move freely, dance and spread independently creating these linear pathways full of qualities of busyness and chaos. These linear structures felt much more physical and unruly, they would ebb and flow creating growths where the lines converge, creating dense areas that suggest the form in space. I took photos of the marbles scattered in situ as it felt like it was punctuated regularly with solid black spheres disrupting the composition.
Pushing the concept of disruption, I incorporated fragments of found red laboratory labels. The red was a vivid contradiction to the monochrome marks I had been creating, causing some sort of duality to happen in the work. The more ambiguous fragmentations came unintentionally, when curating the pop-up show, when a piece of tape removed the pigmentation of the ink from the transparent sheet disrupting the pattern and therefore sense of safety, I had created. Thought is transient and unstable, ergo these brakes create a different balance one that has a more direct link to thought and mental health.
The move to the foyer space was an interesting transition that allowed me to be selective about which experimental processes to take further. I developed a way to be less precious with my work by creating mass compilations through digital facsimile reproduction. Not dissimilar to collage, taking sections, positioning and linking different elements of the work, consciously making the decision to layer them together, simultaneously discarding bits that don’t work.
The residency culminated in an intimate pop up show, representing a pause in the artistic journey.
Grateful to have been given this opportunity, the experience has been invaluable. Woking alongside the artists that make up the Drawing Matters Collective, made all the difference as it provided the space to engage in some very interesting, encouraging and supportive conversations. Feedback and hearing questions helped me to avoid premeditation and catalysed me to keep making.
Sadly, my time on the residency seemed to go so quickly, where my process of drawing and dwelling resulted in numerous creative visual concepts that flooded in faster that I could make. Reflecting on ideas, I envisage pulling key elements out to complete this artistic journey to create a composition of tendrils constructed from tape occupying a room – mimicking the structure in the marble drawing.
