Project AM 730: Drawing

Rooted Elsewhere, Graphite, Charcoal, Ink on Laminated Khozo Paper, 157x180cm, 2014

​Inspiration:
A personal experience of migration continues to act as an emotive narrative in my art practice. I plan to develop a studio based research project that further examines the impact of migration through the activity of drawing from a discordant cultural perspective. An Anglo/Australian position frames this inquiry and will explore the sensory side effects of mass migration through an engendered lens. 

​The transitory and complex nature of the migratory experience is recontextualised through an interchange of everyday activities, such as knitting and weaving, which in turn provide alternative surfaces to draw on and to rethink how meaning can be embedded in both the act and materiality of drawing. 

A cultural ‘sensoaesthetic’ [Miodownik & Laughlin 2015] is conceptually woven into the works to further narrate the migrant story and experience, creating an emotional and physical imprint through the language of line, tone and pattern making. In doing so, migration in practice is composed to read as felt experience, which in effect contributes to material cultural and political dialogue. 

A series of visual pathways trace the transient stories of the migrant route through surface sgraffito that communicate personal and cultural topographies. Making connections between personal experience and contemporary art discourse is intended to challenge the traditional value systems that locate the empirical and local as other.

Description: 
The drawing project AM 730 is a practice led visual research project that will explore, through the materiality of traditional and non traditional drawing surfaces, the act of drawing as a positive activity that influences visual knowing. Finding meaning therefore is firmly located in the materiality/sensoaesthetic  practice of drawing and not in its objectivity. The project is time based [730 days] and is shaped through a multifactorial lens where three strands of investigation: studio practice as a research, interdisciplinary material collaboration and the creation of an on line archive fuse to deliver a comprehensive body of work that is aesthetically and intellectually unified in its pursuit for contributing to knowledge building, finding meaning and understanding. 

Miodownik, M. Laughlin, L. November 2015. The Institute of  Making Blog. Available From:
​http: //www.instituteofmaking.org.uk/research/sensoaesthetic-materials

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