Migration in Practice: Drawing

Drawing on Women's Stories: without them we would have no community to talk off , and without that we would have no culture.

Interdisciplinary Drawing: Mixed Media on Styrofoam, 2016.

Interdisciplinary Drawing: Mixed Media on Paper on Board, 2018.

Drawing with Thread, Paper and Ink, 2016.

Weaving Stories yet Untold#1: Mixed Media on Khozo Paper, 2018.

Weaving Stories yet Untold#2: Mixed Media on Khozo Paper, 2018.

Drawing: A Question of Materiality

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​My approach to drawing is fluid, spontaneous and intuitive, exploring the space in which materiality links process and practice. As a tacit language, drawing is both the subject and object of my abstract visual ideas, which are conceptually framed within a language of resistance and representation. Embodied in a Celtic cultural context, the works refer to the phenomena of migration referencing a personal itinerant history as well as the broader history of mass migration from an Irish/Scottish perspective. Drawing, as such, is a felt experience that blends practice and theory, the conscious and unconscious, absence and presence.

Expanding drawings visual literacy is an important characteristic of my creative research and studio practice that function through a multidisciplinary lens, encompassing aspects of painting, printmaking and fibre textiles. An interdisciplinary approach to drawing has assisted in the development of a personal drawing methodology that employs wet and dry materials and hand made knitted surfaces to recreate woven surfaces that evoke a sensory aesthetic that is culturally specific.

In combining conventional and new material methodologies in the practice of drawing it is my intention to advance my creative practice and material knowledge and further challenge drawings traditional boundaries through overlapping empiricism with the language of drawing. In contextualising drawing within this framework, drawing is in a state of becoming and can be translated as ‘anything’. As such, drawing has the capacity to expand its own place within the canon of Western Art through material knowledge building, which in effect contributes to finding meaning and understanding.