About

The application of line is an improvisational act, with each unpremeditated stroke and the negative space in calligraphic unison, a capturing which results in numerous drawings, the majority discarded. Those that approach some ideal and remain have an aspect of the closed-circuit, where the viewer’s eye is held in a chain of attraction between one mark and the next, at times, or where the decipherability of the line communicates the inherent complexity bound in a pose.

Following an extended period of creative block I returned to drawing and printmaking through a need, verging on desperation, to reclaim my own identity as an artist. After serious illness, repatriation and early motherhood, that want to draw and carve again, to find and master that forsaken skill, to feel that movement of wrist, the sense of self-worth and progression has only deepened.

I have now been working consistently for several years with the model Soga Shibari, a rope-top and self-tying Shibari performance artist. The institutionalised practice of life-drawing, with its structure of time and location, was immediately cathartic, the queer and gender fluid space became a liberation from my self-imposed heteronormative lifestyle. The traditional structure of artist and model disrupted into a collaborative relationship between desire, skill, pain, objectification and immediacy. The dynamic begins with a chosen object and the pose I want, balanced against the model’s own physical limits and absolute consent. I then set about urgently seeking for a perspective, conscious of the active restriction or self-suspension, a process heading towards a point of intolerability, a temporality held through the intricacy of her knot making, where only a fragment is caught before the contortion of the form needs to dissolve.

When successful, these works present narratives of the modern feminine and the historical female, liberated yet constrained, sexualised though castrated by circumstance. They look to embody the contemporary paradox of gender and sexuality, a faceless subject, hidden yet revealed, in control of its own submission, from knot to intricate knot.

My practice is born of a female gaze that battles but concedes to the pervasiveness of the male gaze, a Sapphic inversion resulting in a fluidity of sexualisation and treatment, where constriction leads to an accentuation of the corporeal, and where an entwined object acts as an extension of the self, routed in the craft of drawing and the struggle of the pristine line.