Experimental Work

As part of my MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, I have tasked myself with a complete overhaul of my practice, challenging painting and drawing to expand my thinking and undertaking academic research alongside to understand better the concepts that contribute to and situate my work. Over the past two years I have been interrogating the notion of ‘landscape’ or ‘place’ in my work, seeing the word ‘landscape’ as increasingly obsolescent, regarding the drawing and painting of my environment as a de facto image as a barrier to a more fluid, reciprocal relationship with place, that allows space and attention giving to the Earth in a time of alarming ecological precarity.

Below are some of the examples of my expanded definition of drawing created over the past two years in the hope of finding a practice of creativity that expresses mutuality with place, moving looking into participation and understanding. I seek to find kin in all Earthly components from the compost heap in my garden to the more-than-human entities that interconnect so many naturally occurring systems, such as mycelium and the underground networks of critters and crawlies. I am furthermore challenging my materiality towards a circularity of purpose in a hope of an ecologically neutral - or almost neutral - artistic practice and I see my drawing in this way as an act of radical kindness.

I am questioning my use of indigo, which for a long time has been my colour of grief and love and re-contextualising the production, usage and meaning of indigo in my work. I will be conducting field research in Indonesia at the end of 2025 to educate myself on traditional methods of indigo production and to gain some insight into the complex and difficult history of this revered pigment, referred to by the East India Company as blue gold, due to its high trade value. I will be studying with Threads of Life in all aspects of indigo.