About the work

This drawing pretends to be a ‘public’ drawing but really exists as part of a drawing process that is meant for me (only), unfolding as I go along, in order to focus on stuff I’d like to bring together …later. But occasionally it’s useful to work on a drawing with this sense of embarrassment, from knowing it will leak out into public space; I recognise its state of ‘too much’ yet also need to find it some balance, between that excess and ‘not enough.’ Then it’s able to get on in the world without me.

This drawing is a system that begins by thinking about Margaret Mead’s work about the cultural conditioning of sexual behaviour. I’m trying to hold this as a single thought through looking at a photograph of her for too long, to the point of getting lost (in the edges between her eye and her glasses), and becoming somewhat aware of myself doing this. Then there’s a memory of something my father was seeing, lucidly and consistently, before he died; the regular visits by a Silesian woman who would crawl into his room on her hands and knees with a huge ‘curative’ leaf on her back. The leaf would speak, to him. Then there are Aldrovandi’s botanical drawings of alchemical plants that he perceived as being part human or animal; again, I’m wondering whether they were intended as metaphor, or analogy, a diagram. Or perhaps he was lying. Or they’re his reality and this is exactly how he saw these plants. 

As anchors the drawing has a rock (from my sculpture Props…) and a pine cone (used as part of my work Ghost). Both objects are to be felt rather than looked at. Drawing them becomes another kind of handling, about their materiality; weight, temperature, smoothness etc. against a body. There are also some marks which I nearly always incorporate, that are taken from my ongoing drawing series Meeting of people with stammers to describe fire. All of these parts hold a question about attempts to enable speaking a truth. These elements, marks and materials make a system that develops on the paper surface. It’s like how a group of people will develop their dynamic over time, usually as a response to a change (a new arrival, a change of place, an external event etc.). The transition between each phase of the drawing is like editing in film; each element has a place, atmosphere and a duration, not of my time spent making those marks but how the marks occupy the space of the page – how they take up time with the eye.

Date and country of birth

1988, GB