Puddle Worlds
2021
Drawing with ink and rainwater, in the confined space of my garden during lockdown, led me to travel in my imagination from a small garden puddle to a landscape of possibilities and a wider elemental exploration of place, land and sea, earth and water. As I tried to contain, trace around and rescue inky edges from disappearing into the page, an imaginary world appeared. Mapping the same area repeatedly over a period of time, the boundaries and borders in each Puddle World drawing shifted, hinting at the impact of political and climate change.
The first puddle world drawing and the emergence of an idea came about during Drawing Correspondence in a project led by Tania Kovats. Reflecting on ways to take ground rubbings in the rain, which has proved problematic on some of my journeys, I started to create rainwater puddles in the garden. An accidental print from the last remnants of a puddle looked washed out so, before throwing it away, I traced around it and unexpectedly found the beginnings of a new work. These have since grown into a series of drawings from the same puddle, including some scaled up versions. The first drawing features in GROW (published on Issuu), accompanied by the following text, my letter to the puddle:
A selection from the series are shown above. To see the making of two of the puddle world drawings, press play on the above two image boxes.
Two Puddle World drawings from this series were exhibited in the GroundWorks exhibition, Place Time Material, June 2021.
Several Puddle World drawings were exhibited in Letting it settle, a hyphæ drawing collective exhibition at Touch base Gallery, Folkestone, Sept 2021.
Puddle World I can also be viewed online alongside other walking drawing works at #WalkCreate Gallery 1.
I wrote about Puddle Worlds for Living Maps Review (Spring 2022 Edition). Read more about it and find the link to the article here: Groundlines and Puddle Worlds: maps as records of real and imaginary worlds.