Over time, drawing has become an increasingly important part of my practice, both as a way of investigating ideas for three-dimensional work and as a process in its own right. This has had the consequence of the two activities becoming thoroughly intermeshed. Drawing has gradually been introduced onto the surface of my sculptures as a substitute for a feature or a plastic form and my drawings have become more sculptural in their production through physical scratching into the surface of the paper and moulding of the drawn lines with abrasives.
Not all my drawings have been blueprints for physical sculptures and in recent years the process of drawing for its own sake has been a stimulus for me. I very much enjoy the opportunity to explore a contained context within which images can exist and to develop more narrative compositions that simply become clumsy and over-theatrical in three-dimensional work. However, I am also fascinated by the possibility of the sculpture surface becoming a kind of canvas for drawn designs. For example, a series of drawings entitled Mind Maze directly influenced the textured imagery in my silver sculpture Lexicon, made for the Sterling Stuff II exhibition held at Pangolin London, King’s Place in 2008.
A natural evolution of reproducing images onto sculptural surfaces has been to use replicated images in two dimensions on paper. Printmaking and sculpture have always had a natural affiliation due to the similarity in their physical production. Relief printing in particular is a sculptural process in its own right. My own early monoprints use more or less the same technique employed to imprint motifs on the sculptures made with repeated patterns on their surfaces. These negative-positive combinations fascinate me and like the drawing process, my print and sculpture practices have become closely intertwined.