This year I have been exploring themes around animism, disembodiment and the connection or relationship between drawing and growing.

Heads, faces and parts of the body float in empty space. Those empty spaces become as important as the places where there is ‘work’. The untouched paper in the drawings and the white walls behind the tiny sculptures, suspend the forms.

The drawings are not complete invention; I work from photos. The prints I use are deliberately small so there is only an overall form and a sense of its surface to use. I respond to what I think I might have seen. Most of the drawing in this way, is generation.

‘Alive is Afoot’ started as a heavily trimmed willow near a canal in Bromley-by-Bow. Cut in the winter and grown back over a summer it was not very tree-like in form. The drawn marks developed into something like vertical sentences without words, written over each other from high to low. The form of a face appeared over weeks of drawing. I approached ‘Oiwa’ in the same way. The Yew was growing in a churchyard near my house and had been cut hard around the bottom to avoid the gravestones. Over the weeks of drawing, the hypnotic sensation of repeating these forms started to suggest further objects without paper being needed. Wire seemed to be close to a pencil line, and white clay applied over it like a reversal of drawing. I think of these tiny objects as escaped particles or vapours from the drawings, drifting away.

When drawing for hours in a quietened state, the sensations in my body become more noticeable. Pulse and breaths are at the forefront but also other smaller buzzy, tingling sensations, many rhythmic. The connection seems to be there between these and the marks in my drawing. It’s possible to reach an almost hallucinogenic state through hours of mark-making, and overall forms in the drawing seem to emerge by themselves. The changing moods of the passing weeks weave into the drawing as well. A sensation of disembodiment is common while I am working. I’m very still with only one hand and moving eyes. The emergence of a floating head seems to be appropriate.

The original subjects of my starting photos are often urban and suburban trees very tightly managed by councils and estates so not to obstruct passage or threaten buildings. The forms result partly from cutting and partly from natural growth. They are a sort of battle between two forces. Spotting these is sometimes difficult because the subject matter is so banal as to be practically invisible. The countryside is not the place to find them and often parks yield nothing but a B&Q car park often will. Using these photographed forms as a position to begin from, it is possible to reach an image after many days of drawing, shifting ideas and thoughts and ultimately extended time which is so complicated it resembles little else. In this body of work heads and faces and their smaller floating parts have appeared. In past work, other themes have emerged.

Huge thanks to Kate Atkin for imbuing such powerful spirit on our humble space.