I find Facebook memories a useful tool in reminding me what I’ve been up to in previous years. It is useful to see what I was making one year/ three years/ six years ago. 

Yesterday a post popped up from 2018 of a drawing I was doing then as part of the Cause and Effect body of work. There were similarities to the work I’m doing now, making twigs from bound waste paper. I could say that the current work is a three dimensional version of the drawing. 

This is interesting in that it is completely unintended. I have explored many avenues in the intervening years. But here I am, not “stuck” exactly… but still fixated on similar forms and lines, finding different ways to render them. The drawings were more abstract that the making is. These I think are more definitely twig-like. But it does lead me to the idea that they need not be. 

The work I do always seems to have an element of push and pull about it. I like this. An elastic thread between representation and abstraction. The work with twigs started  after the intense hard work of producing Drawing Songs, which was a funded project with all the stresses that involves. I wanted to get back to basics, back to something I didn’t want to have to think about to much. I just wanted to “feed” myself with some observational drawing. Old art school basics: if in doubt, draw what you see. But after a while my natural tendencies took over and I was able to push away from the observed into the conceptual. I am still exploring this stretching… and I think each thing I do pulls and pushes away and against those initial observations. 

The reminder of the drawing has prompted me to step a little further away from just making representations of twigs, and to explore these three dimensional forms in a less referential way…

It is also useful to remind myself that I can be trusted. I don’t need to worry about WHY I’m doing things. I just need to keep turning up to do the work in front of me, then every now and then, the WHY turns up of its own accord, when it’s ready.