Drawing
Drawing is an essential element of my practice. It helps me to simplify the patterns in a landscape and to record the important details of light and shadow. Being confident with a pencil or pen is also fundamental to the design and carving of lino blocks - if you’re not accurate and in control of the razor sharp tools, the lino will disintegrate.
I set myself the challenge of covering the expanse of a sheet of A1 with intricate patterns of ink, following a set of rules. Every pattern should create a circle, but no patterns could be repeated and wherever possible the pen would not be lifted from the paper.
As the drawing progressed it took on its own direction and I was simply the tool which completed the pattern, according to the instructions.
Life Cycles Archival Ink on 300 GSM Bockington Paper 60 x 85 cm
The act of repetition within a process led to another series of drawings which included the ‘Sea Green Spiral’, and culminated in ‘Inspiralation’.
Sea Green Spiral, Ink on paper A4
‘Inspiralation’ is based on a drawing of an ammonite by the evolutionary biologist Erich Haeckel.
Haeckel believed that the human race consisted of multiple species and that by eliminating the weak and the sick, and allowing the ‘inferior’ species to become extinct, humans could aspire to perfection.
It was the foundation of eugenics.
I wanted to subvert Haeckel’s theory, borne of a mixture of ignorance of human epidemiology yet absolute certainty that he was correct, with the words of a contemporary of Haeckel, Hans Maria Rilke. In his ‘letters to a young poet’ Rilke encourages his protégé to embrace uncertainty and let the answers come to him.
Inspiralation , Graphite on Fabriano 250GSM paper 85 x 85 cm
On the 86 nodes of the ammonite I inscribed the following words from Rilke’s letter.
I beg you dear Sir, as well as I can to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Rilke himself was only twenty seven years old when he wrote these words. I think that being able to embrace uncertainty and live with doubt is essential for artists.