As a designer and illustrator I draw, write, design, illustrate by hand. Drawing helps me understand the world around me. It’s always been my way of expression and language. I use colour in limitless indulgent variety. and shades and I build, compose and collage my pieces using hundreds of layers of digital drawings and photographs.

 

The influences that travel through my heart and my head are channelled to my drawing hand. My right hand. Inspired by a film, a book, a flower, a beautiful landscape, music and memory. I start with a doodle, that becomes a sketch, and then a drawing becomes a completed illustration, a fully-fledged design. This process remains constant in all that I do.

 

When I started to draw I used a pencil, when I went to art college I trained as a weaver. I drew, painted and glued my drawings together I dyed, threaded and wove my designs into fabric. Today however, I use a ‘stylus’ instead of a lead pencil. My sketchpad is made of plastic and silicon instead of paper. A computer records my doodles, sketches, illustrations, designs and pallet. The drawing is saved as a file of data. The drawing process remains constant but by virtue of the computer and the drawing being saved as data, my craft has become digital.

 

Often, people’s immediate response to my work is personal and emotive: ‘Oh, isn’t that beautiful.’ And because it is a craft they imagine to be hand-rendered, they place a high value on it. Historically, the value attached to a product comes through authenticity, provenance, heritage, and location. Value also comes from the notion of being hand-made, from the brush strokes, the chiselled wood, the hand-drawn sketch of a dress that someone is now able to wear.

 

However, as I explain the process and the involvement of the computer, the disappointment is evident in the response - ‘Oh you did it on your computer,’ and the value placed on a product is cheapened. Is it because it has the potential to be mass-produced It doesn’t have a unique, one-of-a kindness.

Acceptable in a product but not in art and design.

 

The response implies surprise, confusion, mistrust, perhaps even displeasure that a computer was used in the process of creating a thing of beauty. Somehow the use of a computer as one of my tools undermines the process, and so diminishes the value of the end product.

 

This response - ‘Oh you did it on your computer’ also implies there is little or no craft in creating work through a digital medium. Somehow, ‘digital’ undermines this process, lessens the craft. Why is this?

 

a.    Are people surprised because computers can’t draw?

b.    Are people confused because computers are something you programme?

c.     Is the mistrust because computers mass produce products that dominate our daily lives - how can it be a tool with character?

d.    Is the displeasure because a computer does not produce hand-rendered craft?

e.    Is it that that they expect a more digital looking product from a computer.....not something beautiful.

 

The difficulty people have in connecting something that is hand-made with a computer comes from seeing the computer as the machine that produces things, as opposed to a machine that is simply another tool in the armoury of makers. We have lived in a mechanised production age for more than 200 years. The very first computer was a loom, the Jacquard Loom designed for mass production producing beautiful silks that are treasured now in museums as a thing of value and craft. Maybe perhaps my computer is too ‘of the moment’ and not being steeped in history, does not create linked to a nostalgic notion. It has not yet become old  fashioned.

 

 

 

Credits and Influences.

 

I saw Blade Runner when I was 14.

When I came out of the cinema I knew I wanted a computer, I wanted to design dresses, create textiles, take photographs, make films.

 

Ridley Scott

1982

Enhance 224176
Enhance, Stop
Move in, Stop
Pull out, Track right, Stop
Center in, Pull back, Stop
Track 45 right, Stop
Center and Stop
Enhance 34 to 36
Pan right and pull back, Stop
Enhance 34 to 46
Pull back, Wait a minute, Go right, Stop
Enhance 5719
Track 45 left, Stop
Enhance 15 to 23
Give me a hard copy right there.

 

In The Mood For Love

When I came out of the cinema I realised I was a hopeless romantic and wanted to tell a story through my work.

Wong Kar-wai

2000

 

It is a restless moment.
She has kept her head lowered,
to give him a chance to come closer.
But he could not, for lack of courage.
She turns and walks away.
That era has passed.
Nothing that belonged to it exists any more.

He remembers those vanished years.
As though looking through a dusty windowpane,
the past is something he could see, but not touch.
And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct..