Spend a few days at “The Sheds” in Whiltshire, friends of mine have created a amazing home for their family, a oasis of creativity, whenever I had the opportunity to stay with them, surrounded by original artwork and their deep passion for art, encouraging and supporting artists…I return with the belief that what I am doing has a place, is important for me to persude. I was teaching a stone carving course there and it could not have been different to the weekend in March when we had some snow at the Rococo Garden. We were carving in blazing heat all weekend long, with the luxury of a dip into the pool at the end of the day. I met the artist Andrew Vass during his residency, the conversations I had with him sparked many thoughts about the process of working, decisions during mark making and seeing drawings in a completely different light to creating representations. I do have hang ups about my drawing, because I still have that expectation that a drawing needs to be recognisable, NO IT DOESN’T! Making marks can be a different world, a line can have a massive story to tell, a mark can be changed, has it’s own history and time scale, a shadow of it’s own existence, can disappear leaving nothing but a memory. The conversations with Andrew inspire me to explore drawing in a totally fresh way, it also brought me closer to the work of my colleague and friend Emily Joy. Thank you to Aubrey and Kay Newman for hosting a deluxe stone carving weekend as well as putting up my drawing “Ceasura” this weekend, good to see that one in a new light too. Watch the space!

20.01.2013, Ceasura (detail), graphite on paper