grid drawings, or 'meditations'

The 'grid drawings' began as an exercise to temper my eye and hand and calm tumultous emotions at the time of my widowed mother's hospitalisation in May 2016. It was a particularly beautiful month that year, generous warmth during the day, fragrance from luxuriant Spring growth by night. I remember the apple blossom glowing snowy white at dusk, the scent hanging on the air like a perfumed curtain, when I walked alone in my mother's garden after visiting her in hospital.

Guardian of the house for the period of my mother's sojourn in hospital, and, having previously purchased on impulse a trio of squared paper notebooks, which I had with me, I began to draw. Following a directive unfathomable in origin, I coloured in the tiny squared enclosures using a selection of coloured pencils from a pencil tin of my late father's which I had found in the house during my stay. I came to settle upon a square of thirteen little squares by thirteen ( there were thirteen differently coloured pencils in the tin). This seemed to satisfy my eye for the moment. I became aware that the drawings needed something to unify them, and thus applied a layer of graphite, like a skin or veil, through which the colours glowed softly. The graphite membrane seemed to function as a visual metaphor; a device to suggest distance; the shadowy reaches between experience and recollection, or between the inner world of the mind, and external reality. I drew each day as though possessed, even taking the notebooks to the hospital so that I could draw in the hospital canteen between visiting hours.

I did not know then, that four years later I would still be compelled to make these tiny, intense yet subtle drawings and that the drawings would have evolved so much in terms of their poetic and emotional resonance. I draw every day, as though my life depends on it, aware that, as before, owing to difficult circumstances, I need to assuage panic and focus my attention beyond the narrow confines of my mind.

Titles for the pieces came, and come, unbidden to mind. Often they are generated by the memory of a place, or happening, a person, or state of mind. I frequently dedicate pieces to people, thus a piece comprising four drawings entitled 'over the hills and faraway', is for my partner, and refers to the period in our life together when we lived in rural isolation in Hampshire. 'My sister's harlequin slippers' is dedicated to one of my sisters and refers to  her chequered velvet slippers, which, as a child, she loved so much that she even wore them in the garden.

When I frame the pieces I follow the counsel of someone I trust, who suggested that I reference the notebook. Thus, I frame them in such a way as to show the edge of the page where they have been torn out of the book. Notebooks of drawings are like visual diaries; to show only removed pages is to imply that there is other, hidden material, perhaps too intimate to reveal. Certainly such a drawing, once removed evokes the invisible notebook, and is suggestive of the activity of keeping a diary; the reflective, quiet setting down of thoughts, responses, dreams. Notebooks are portable and private, both attributes which I value. The drawings made within them are my journal entries.