Catherine Laura Ward

The Language of drawing and mark making enables me to express something raw and immediate in my experience. I am interested in the use of drawing to respond to a site and explore how a space can be transformed through the immediacy and qualities of the media.

Observational drawings of people moving and interacting within a space were the starting point for developing more personal themes and reconnecting with my practice.

Reoccurring themes within the work are the passing of time and memory. The drawings reflect feelings and sensations of being still as the world moves around me. The imagery became layered and overlapping. Tracing paper became important to express transience as shadow imagery emerged.

The pieces displayed were made in the empty house of my Grandparents before the house was sold. They are presented as visual mementos to express the nature of how memories project and emerge.

In September I embarked upon a new period of redirection in my art practice and started studying a postgrad in Creative Practice with Artpocket Independent Art School in Norwich. The postgrad is a bridging course between a Degree and MA to help build an Artist Practice or help refocus an existing practice. I wanted to explore and refocus my work after practising and exhibiting independently since I graduated from my Fine Art Degree in 2010.

At the end of the first term in December 2017, the postgrad students worked towards a Collaborative Project. I found the prospect of this unit scary and exciting, as I have collaborated on exhibitions and events, but I had never collaborated with Artists towards a body of work.

Our tutor Becky Tough, provided a safe and enjoyable approach to Collaboration, building us up slowly by introducing different printing techniques so we could start to get a sense of each other’s work as well as providing a technique for what we might want to make the collaborative work from. Our starting point was the Film; ‘All about my Mother’ by Director Pedro Almodóvar. We were encouraged to explore themes that interested us from the film to make visual responses, that we then wove together as the collaboration unfolded.

I found it an exciting process, learning how others work and my natural reflective process started to adapt to a more spontaneous approach, as I responded to different people and their ideas. I am a visual thinker, and I began to get visual images of how our collaboration could form and incorporate all 3 of us. Communication and leadership skills were developed, and the group needed to be held with support and sensitivity as we moved towards producing work and getting to know each other at the same time.

My visual response from the Film, was capturing shadows in drawing form to communicate the heritage echoes that were portrayed in, ‘All about my Mother’. I started developing drawings on tracing paper, layering images on top of each other, and illuminating the images with a lightbox. The collaboration weaved together ideas from drawing, sculpture and textiles, producing a final body of work that consisted of printed images onto panels of fabric. We made images from a house hold object to give a sense of the meaning of family and heritage and over laid the image to show that sense of time. The outcome was a ghostly, bodily feel to the panels.