Hackney Downs

    In 2005 I began an open-ended process of making memory drawings recording my frequent bicycle trips across Hackney Downs. In 2006 these drawings became the starting point for the Hackney Downs work.
    The relationship between the drawings, and the paintings and constructions which followed was not a straightforward one. At first every attempt to make ‘art’ out of the drawings seemed a betrayal of their nature. The drawings were memory jottings. They were not ideas for painting, they attempted to avoid the distancing of ‘art’ altogether.
   Eventually I did find a way of working which, instead of developing ideas from the drawings, in some sense paralleled the way they were made. As well as being sources of imagery the drawings are objects – paper or card with marks on.  I began to use the drawings as materials along with other happened-on materials – maybe an umbrella, garden trellis, string, paper-maché or even paint. I tried to respond to these materials in as direct a way as I responded to the memory traces of my Downs crossings.
    I have tried to tell this story in my book Being in the Studio with Hackney Downs.

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