Special projects

‘Special Projects’ is the area where I park all those things that have been/are quite special to me, but don’t quite fit elsewhere! They include: series’ of made objects (shoes, cicadas, dolls, little + big books etc); work I have undertaken at various international residencies (Mexico, Guatemala, Spain) and drawing projects (My Mother book). These have been some of my favourite creative immersions.

Papier-mache cicada series/2023

‘My Mother’ book of digital drawings

‘The Covid Chronicles’: lockdown project for instagram/ self-published book.

Image from ‘The Covid Chronicles’
Image from ‘The Covid Chronicles’
Image from ‘The Covid Chronicles’
Image from ‘The Covid Chronicles’
Image from ‘The Covid Chronicles’
Image from ‘The Covid Chronicles’

Shoe Stories

‘Shoe Stories’ began as a simple lockdown/Covid project trying to work out how to distract myself and make a papier-mache shoe.

The project grew into a long love affair with ‘paper shoes’ - each one telling a story of or for its recipient. The process became a way to creatively escape… and so it was that travel featured highly.

Creative Immmersion:

Spanish residency, 2023.

My residency in the hills around Andalusia was a real surprise to my sensibilities. The earth, the sky, the way the weather encircled us in the large stone house on the hill, were all unfamiliar to me.

Apart from grinding my own pigments from the earth, I needed a ‘big picture’ project. I decided to set about addressing my desire to always ‘take it with you’. With the recent death of my father, I had begun to wonder how we might keep ahold of things that mattered to us. How could I keep some of Spain with me? What could I reasonably ‘take’ - and, perhaps give?

I decided I would collect ‘10 things a day’, bring them back to the studio and draw them. This offered me a process-led examination of found objects that became the foundation to my stay. My aim was to ‘release’ these objects back from where I’d found them, and keep only the drawings, little books and pigment paintings that I’d done.

For an inveterate collector of things, experiences, people etc, this was as close to ‘letting go’ as I could bear. It was a most interesting exercise…and one I will inevitably write more about one day.

Mexican Residency, 2022

I find Mexico irresistible.

I have completed two residencies there. My most recent was in Puebla in 2022, and it was a game-changer. What creatively emerged could never have happened anywhere else…I stayed in an extraordinary red + white house, complete with quotes emblazoned on the walls (‘The capacity of representation is the measure of domination’/Theodor W. Adorno), was challenged, frustrated and confronted by compulsory readings and residency meetings with a complex, authoritarian academic.

‘Coming down’ from these liaisons, I’d wander the local streets, in awe of the colour and life I witnessed. Amassing a collection of cheap souvenirs and household items purchased along my route, I envisioned an artwork around the issue of representation that is still working its way through me. Of course, there’s much more to this story…and one day I shall tell it properly.