Drawings are a method for me to explore and develop ideas for new work.
After the birth of my daughter I was thinking about reproduction and movement: cells clustering and flowing in the body; seed dispersal and migration in the landscape. [My previous film, A Desire For Organic Order (2016), drew from botany to explore ideas of migration, belonging and nativeness.]
Caring for my child in the daytime, I made small drawings on paper and digitally on a tablet. Often with only 10 or 20 minutes to work, drawings were created over several sessions, sometimes days or weeks apart.
Mark-making (making marks on a page) became a way to articulate time passing as the rhythm and pace of my daily life shifted. The marks look like sewing stitches. I had begun to research historical midwifery and obstetric archives online. One of the few artefacts in this field that translates to life outside of a hospital environment are sewing materials. I myself had stitches after my daughter was born. Painting sequences of stitch-type marks in cellular forms and motion offered a fluid way to consider these themes.
The photographs within the drawings are pictures of my home. They are from a series titled ‘4am’, made when my daughter was one year old. I was often active in these early hours to find time for my art practice before the household awoke. The space felt alien to me on these occasions and the distanced perspective of the camera captures this feeling for me.
Each digital photograph was cropped into quadrants. Each quarter was then printed out on my A4 home B&W laser printer, trimmed and reassembled to produce larger prints. My intention was merely to test for scale, however enlarging the prints using this method meant that they did not fully realign to form a complete image. This fragmented and out-of-sync aesthetic resonated with my experience.
I re-photographed the hand-assembled printouts and overlaid them with my cell-stitch drawings. The drawings capture some of my perspective at this time and became a way to think about future work.
These themes relating to a contemporary experience of new mothering and its relationship to historical maternity materials and practices led to the development of the workshop series, New Mothers’ Assembly (2019), and my film, As You Were (2024).
