About the work

In their impermanence, drawings and drawing materials seem to embody a sense of the fragility of living things. Questions about values of an object (physical and hierarchical) interest me. Frottage, the act of taking rubbings, has intrinsic potential to reveal a ‘version’ of an object, sometimes of more clarity or even value, than the original. The object and the ground onto which it is transferred through direct touch, align in meaning to present a different possible view: something abandoned becomes of note, something random or provisional seems deliberate.

The drawing, Mutation Unit, 2023, re-visits a body of work titled Re-Natured, 2019-22 and was made especially for the Drawing Biennial 2024. It references a work, Sample Mutations, 2019-20 where multiple photocopied grounds were used to receive, through a haptic process, rubbings of discarded organic matter. A large drawing, Nest I, 2020 from Re-Natured, is now in the V&A’s permanent collection.

Date and country of birth

1963, GB

Career Highlights

Group exhibitions: The Human Touch: Making Art, Leaving Art, Leaving Traces, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2021-22); Realisation, The Fitzilliam Museum, Cambridge (2016-17); Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now, Los Angeles and The Menil Collection, Hammer Museum, Houston (2015); British Drawings: 1600 to the Present Day, V&A, London (2013).

Solo Shows: Regeneration: Works on Paper, Tokyo Gallery + BTAP, Tokyo (2008).

Public Collections: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; Connecticut, USA; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; V&A, London; The British Museum, London; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham; Arts Council Collection, London; Kasser Foundation, Montcalir; New Jersey, USA.