My work is situated within the ideologies of eco-feminism, reflecting on the exploitation and subordination of women, the natural world, and how these two parallel histories are connected. My concerns with both environmental and feminist issues are joined in my work through drawings, inspired by my own interactions with the landscapes around me. As the places I inhabit feed into my work, I explore the reciprocal relationship between place and personal identity.
Typically large scale, densely colourful and mounted on to free standing steel structures, my drawings attempt to capture the contrasts and conflicts between urban and rural, specifically between London and the rural wildernesses of Wales in which I was raised. Through selecting and magnifying tiny details of the natural areas within the landscapes, my drawings become abstracted. They simultaneously reduce the landscape to planes of slowly oscillating tone, light and shadow, whilst enhancing the intensity and scale of the colour.
The making of these highly pigmented drawings is both intensely laborious and delicate, both physically and emotionally challenging to complete. This almost self sacrificial nature to the drawing process links to other traditionally female crafts whilst reflecting on the part that botanical drawing played in the rise of the feminist movement in the early 19th century. The variation of mark, tonal value and texture made by this long drawing process highlights their durational quality, their slow development mirroring the slow growth of a plants and green spaces that inspired them.
Though natural in their origin the use of such intense colours, and industrial materials such as steel, introduces ambiguities and contrasts into the work. These contradictions are heightened by the use of photography. After completing the drawings I install them within the landscapes they respond to, photographing them almost camouflaged in the natural spaces. This use of photography captures a brief moment of fragility as the drawings become temporarily vulnerable, inhabiting an environment that has both influenced their creation, yet could so easily erase them. This photographic cohabitation of the works strong presence and pregnability within the landscape acts as a feminist exploration in to photographic land art, a space historically colonised by male artists.
The use of steel further questions gendered art practices as adds a very masculine element to an otherwise very feminine drawing practice. Exhibited alongside the photographs, these free standing optical planes or sculpture/drawing hybrids occupy space in a way which forces the viewers interaction. Whether this is through having to manoeuvre around their scale, or face their own reflection in the metal surface, these pieces refuse to behave as either fully sculptural or totally two dimensional. The reflective qualities of the metal provide further camouflage, acting almost as a trick as their man made surfaces mimic the spaces they inhabit.
This work aims to defy gendered categorisations, whilst making the viewer question the natural or unnatural state of the work. I aim for these pieces to force the viewer to question their own ideas of gender and reflect on their place within the natural world; Perhaps questioning how urban and rural areas can exist more harmoniously together, providing alternative spaces to display works of art.
