Drawing, for me, is always a way back in. When I feel scattered or stretched thin, it’s drawing that steadies me — not as preparation for something else, but as the work itself. Gesture on paper, gesture in space. A way of tuning in.
Gesture as drawing — large-scale work in the studio.
During my Masters, and through research into gesture and drawing, I became increasingly interested in how a line doesn’t need to be confined to paper. A gesture can be durational, spatial, embodied. It might be a sweep of charcoal, but it can also be the step of a foot, the reach of an arm, or the drag of a material across a floor. Artists such as Joan Jonas and Rebecca Horn have long positioned performance itself as a form of drawing — the body as pencil, tracing time through space.
Collaborative drawing
These ideas shaped my most recent project, Ghost in the Machine, for Hidden Door 2025. Developed with Alma Sua Lindenhovius, Fiona Oliver Larkin, and Elvey Anna Stedman, with a live soundscape shaped with the Sativa Drummers, the performance unfolded on the floor of a disused cardboard packaging factory. Set among dormant machines, we imagined the space re-inhabited by half-human, half-myth creatures — a pigeon, a kestrel, and a cat. Through movement, drawing, and sculptural installation, we explored memory, transformation, and industrial folklore.
The performance unfolded among dormant machines in a disused factory, Hidden Door Festival 2025
In Ghost in the Machine, drawing was everywhere. It was in the gestural marks made in response to discarded objects and surfaces. Found objects became collaborators, shaping how lines were made and how gestures unfolded. Large canvases carried these marks before being cut and re-formed into banners, their surfaces holding both the memory of the objects and the animal gestures that directed them. Some objects were placed on ceramic tables as if relics, others sounded during the performance — always shifting between trace, tool, and performer.
Devising Workshops - Found objects became collaborators in the drawing process.
Large canvases were cut and re-formed into banners, Hidden Door Festival 2025
The project emerged from my research into animal mythologies: how creatures gain symbolic roles through archives, folklore, and contemporary city stories, shifting between the real and the imagined. They appear as messengers, tricksters, guardians.
My sculptural works have also circled around these mythologies in contemporary form — from pigeons and cats to stranger hybrids, like a unicorn head cast in copper. Sitting between humour and ritual, these works treat everyday or playful forms as if they were relics or votive objects
Above: Metal working on a unicorn head cast in bronze.
Below: Found Objects were arranged and placed on handmade ceramic tables, like votive relics, Hidden Door Installation 2025
Over the next few weeks I intend to return to some of these same ideas in the studio, working with broken and discarded objects brought from the factory site. I’m not aiming for finished work, but for fragments, traces, and the act of drawing itself — as an action, a rhythm, and a way back into my practice.
In the studio — the space where new ideas begin to take shape.
Belle, my four-legged studio companion who recently passed, now folds into this ongoing mythology — a real presence carried into the imagined. Her old toys, like the factory scraps, still hold traces of touch, play, and presence. They may yet become catalysts for drawing or sculptural experiments — small fragments with the power to spark new myths.
In memory of Belle: Asleep with her toy at West Park Place Studio.