contextual STATEMENT 2021

Drawing & mark making are at the core of my practice; the exploration and research of this subject is fundamental to its development. I am currently investigating the primordial origins of mark making and abstraction in relation to 20th century land art and abstract expressionism. My intention is to reveal connections between them, my practice, contemporary art and its possible future directions. I work with mixed media that combines drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, printing, video, photography, and digital media that includes augmented reality. Drawing and photography are two of the starting points for many of my practical explorations into mark making that extends and combines with other media including augmented reality, as evidenced in my piece Line of Drawings where the boundaries of time and space become blurred, in which reality and fiction combine. The combination of my analogue drawings moving within augmented reality creates a digital record of a reality that only exists as a digital video file, but comes across as a convincing reality. Walking is a most basic natural way of traveling through the countryside or city, a place and time I find for inspiration and reflection where I can combine reality into a digital fiction that becomes an augmented reality file. Although not living in London anymore, as a Londoner my practice is rooted in urban city life. The connections between the mark making of primordial artists and contemporary life are evident all around us in the cities and streets we inhabit, in the form of modern graffiti or various other art forms scrawled into the fabric of the city. These are manifestations of the temporal connections between contemporary life and our primordial past. My life is made up of the journeys in and through various environments both urban and rural. The exploration of the labyrinth of streets, paths, alleyways, tunnels and buildings that make up our urban contemporary environment root my practice to it. This is evidenced in myself appointed residency, a work in development, in which I explore the city as I journey to document and research Labyrinth 2013 by Mark Wallinger installed at 270 locations in the London Underground. Life is a journey and it is through the connections made, emotions experienced whilst traveling that my practice as a contemporary artist becomes manifest as a personal response to the urban and social, political environments that we live in today. This response is my attempt to make sense of my life experiences, whilst exploring and experimenting to identify new directions that utilise contemporary developments in media and methods that could enhance or expand my practice. The various areas of development in the digitisation of art practice and its combination with the analogue is an exciting area of continued future artistic development for me, opening up new possibilities for self-expression.