One of my first ipad drawings. Sitting in my friend Karen’s kitchen in Oxford, chatting with her and learning how to use the Brushes app by drawing the bouquet in her window. Here it is.
December 1st, I had gone to the market in search of tulips, needing a reminder in the darkest, deepest days of autumn that spring would eventually return.
But then, there they were. The surprise of them, out of place, out of season. Bright, almost obscenely crimson peonies, their stems drooping slightly from the heaviness of the petals. Lush, sensuous, the Marilyn Monroe of flowers, brash and vulnerable at once. And oh! the perfume.
I’ve taken the peonies home now, placed them in a vase, and I’m beginning to draw them. As I make my first marks on the page I’m thinking about the differences between visual and written forms of expression, between a word and a line.
I think the essential difference is between the immediacy, almost fleetingness, of visual observation and the much more prolonged and drawn out evocation of memory offered by words. Perhaps it all comes down to their relationships to time.
When I draw the flowers- my hand and eye and the blossoms and stems and scent all become one. I need to inhabit the same time and space as the flowers themselves- to feel their exact weight, form, colour. A drawing is a map, made in time, of what I experienced in looking at the peonies. And if I have been honest and true in my observations (even in an abstract drawing) you will be able to retrace your own way through my map. An exact map is not good. You need to be able to take your own directions, twists and turns along the way.
If I chose to write about the peonies I could take you on a travel through time and memories. I could tell you that I have a red peony in my garden that comes from a root that my great grandparents brought from Ireland during their flight from the potato famines. I could use words to construct a story around their hunger, upheaval, painful voyage, surprising arrival in a new land.
But I will leave you with my drawing of the peonies and let you fill the drawing with your own stories and memories.
One of my favourite summer pastimes is lying under a tree, looking up through a canopy of leaves at a blue summer sky dotted with a few fluffy white clouds. In this work I want to evoke a sensation of dreaming, of drifting and weightlessness- the feeling that you are looking up through the leaves at the clouds- but also that you are floating in the clouds looking back down at yourself. I combined the silk fusion technique with actual leaves from my garden. It seems strangely fitting that each silk mawata square is the product of one cocoon produced by one silkworm from the leaves of the mulberry tree. My palette of lemon yellows and turquoise blues is an attempt to capture the sensation of the shimmering and reflections of the leaves, light, sky, air and clouds.
Drawings from my recent trip to Mexico.
Here are some of my Fabric Creatures.
Here are some photos from my garden this morning.
Love the textures and shapes of the Hostas, the Painted Ferns and the Artemesia- the raindrops on the Clematis.
I’m working on a series of “Fuzzy Orifices”, that will combine crocheted flowers with knitted shapes that evoke plant forms, body parts and organic growth.
Fuzzy Orifices~Spring depicts the exuberance of forms springing to life- of parts emerging from and transforming into other shapes. It contains a mixture of colours, bubble gum pinks and bright reds suggesting the body, combined with the darker greens, browns and blacks of the natural world.
The piece is meant to be slightly critical but also playful, something of an ironic commentary on crocheted granny squares, which have always seemed to me to be a bit too fussy and cute. I want the effect to be a little grotesque and funny at the same time.
My first Fuzzy Orifices. From the spring of 2012.
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