Doing to get through

'Doing to get through' was a sequence of around 60 monoprints I made in 2018. It had been a tough few years of major life events that had taken their toll on the attention I could give to my art practice. This got me feeling very down. However, I am always determined to be active in my narrative (as active as circumstances allow at least) and had several talks with myself, seeing my past experiences as resilience building, and was able to set about carving some time (from minutes to hours) in the evenings to freely experiment with making monoprints on A5 paper – without any endpoint in mind. The purpose was to play and go with the flow of what happened.

It turned out to be a fruitful project, which evolved each evening. I had many prints on the go at once, all laid out on my studio floor and used a variety of things to make marks with (including my old pal aluminium foil). I like how some worked both as flat abstract images as well as sculptural forms. Potentially anthropomorphic, but also otherworldly. My work has come a long way since, but I learned a lot from making the monoprints and hold these works as a pivotal period in my practice.