Drawing Skills: Artist's statement

Combining vegetation and mixed media to portray a spot in my garden in a new, dynamic way.

For many years my garden has been my way of expressing myself creatively; colour, composition and mood all being important. It is a dynamic and ever changing space that always offers something new. It is natural for me to combine it with art for this piece of work and provides a new garden challenge.

I want to present the garden in a new way, keeping the atmosphere but being bold with my ideas. I would like to use specific plant material as my starting point. Ultimately the material need not represent itself.

I am a Textiles student so my inclination is to use texture. I enjoy experimenting and my garden offers opportunities for techniques like frottage and printing and using a variety of media. I have a notion to use vegetation to make shapes. I may then draw into my image.

Experience tells me that my thoughts and ideas will evolve if I immerse myself in my task. I like to explore my subject and gradually come to a resolution – it’s about the process. I want to incorporate some of my new learning but also feel free to take risks. As I work and ideas suggest themselves I expect to change my mind particularly with reference to materials.

My garden is huge space and to try to capture the excitement of it in a new way offers its challenges. I found looking at the work of Anna Atkins (1) was a great way to understand the beauty that is generally hidden from us. Amongst his many skills Henry Fox Talbot (2) was a pioneer of early photography and he created some wonderful organic images with his photogenic drawings. They lead me to a new way of thinking.

I found inspiration too in the frottage work of Max Ernst (3) who taught me that less is certainly more. Roger Miller (4) gives a different, surrealist way to use frottage.

A contemporary artist called Joanne Proctor (5) offers an organic approach to her drawing that I find interesting and sometimes uncomfortable.

One of my favourite materials is graphite and this is fortunate because it lends itself to frottage very well. I plan to experiment with carriers to see what gives the best result for my particular purpose. It is important to me that I have some colour because that is what my garden is about so I will experiment to see how I can do this but keep the integrity of the graphite.

I would like to use Japanese paper for my final work. What I have in mind is somewhere between tissue and heavier paper. Because it is expensive I’ll look for alternatives to use in my experiments probably something like tissue or baking parchment.

When I have finished I want to be able to recognise my reference but I don’t expect or desire a realistic rendering. I want to be inventive and inquisitive and combine the best of what my experiments show me.

Postscript
I realise now that my Artist Statement was more a statement of intent and that I used it as a sort of project plan. It was a very useful thing to do but probably not quite what I was meant to do.

Ultimately my work has been on a macro scale and I have drawn on ideas developed throughout my textiles work. The project leaves lots of room for development in that area and I'm happy with that.