Following a line of enquiry

2025 sees me focussing in increasingly on thoughts half-felt over years, following lines of enquiry to further articulate my practice. The idea of art as making, a system of enquiry, a way of being in the world. I have long been interested in the notion of the body as cypher, as map, giving direction to the art making process.

Barbara Hepworth wrote of how ‘So many ideas spring from an inside response to form; for example, if I see a woman carrying a child in her arms it is not so much what I see that affects me, but what I feel within my own body.  There is an immediate transference of sensation, a response within to the rhythm of weight, balance and tension of the large and small form when making an interior organic whole.’ 1954

Her words have long intrigued me as a summary of experiences within the art making process. I often feel some kind of kinetic response in my self, my body, to an image or form I’m working from that I then aim to translate into the art work.  

Accompanying these musings, I am reading The Thinking Body by Mabel Todd. And, always for me, dance and thoughts on movement. Following hearing the acclaimed choreographer William Forsythe speak in Oxford (video to be uploaded shortly here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKGECJ8EcTzPL-Kh9gzQEuYD9Tiwxm5t2) and looking further into the practice of artist Alexander Calder, my artworks begin to separate out further shape, form, negative space and the fractured line or ‘gap’.

Japanese Anemones (Shellac) I Chamberlain 2025