DRAWING
For me, drawing and dance live in the same breath. Both are rooted in movement, energy, and intent — gestures made visible or felt. In dance, we leave behind trails you can’t see. In drawing, I try to catch those fleeting residues and give them form.
Each mark is part of an ongoing conversation — between body and paper, stillness and motion, noticing and responding. The page becomes a place to return to, again and again, to listen, to move, to make sense.
What traces do we leave behind when we move
through the world?
What gestures live inside the trees you’ve known?
Loci
Mixed media drawings on paper
2023 - ongoing
This work began with a quiet practice I’ve come to call dancing the trees — wandering through paddocks, letting a tree choose me, and then responding to its presence with my body.
I take in its weight and structure, the angle of its reach, the hidden sap rising through its veins. I move with it. I film that dance. Later, in the studio, I draw.
These drawings emerge from intuition rather than design. At first, they’re unruly — squiggles, fragments, gestural marks. But gradually, forms surface. Organic shapes echo the structure of the tree and the movement of the dance. They become a kind of language I don’t fully understand but feel compelled to follow.
This work draws quiet influence from early 20th-century artists like Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton — women who worked at the intersection of mysticism, theosophy, and abstraction. Like them, I lean into the numinous. I don’t know exactly what these images mean, only that they are honest — transmissions from somewhere just beyond language.
You might look at these drawings and wonder:
How do we translate presence — in body, in breath, in branch — into mark?
Have you ever been caught in a wave
— not just by water, but by life?
Anatomy of a wave
Mixed media drawings on paper
Driftwood assemblage
2022/2023
Living near the ocean, I often swim and get overwhelmed by its force — tumbled, held, and re-shaped by something bigger than me. That sensation echoed my own recent move from the city to a rural property: disoriented by beauty, solitude, and a flood of new feelings.
In the studio, I began to explore the link between breath and buoyancy, between the ribcage and the ocean’s structure. How does the body hold, or resist, that kind of movement? Can you draw the inside of a breath the same way you might draw the curl of a wave?
These drawings are part of that exploration — a way of mapping both internal and external turbulence.
You might look at these works and ask:
Where in my own life have I felt swept off my feet?
What part of me knows how to float, even when things shift?
When a bird appears, do you ever wonder who sent it?
And the bird said
Mixed media drawings on paper
Digital animation of drawings
2023/2024
I live with birds, literally. As a licensed wildlife carer with F.A.W.N.A, birds are stitched into my daily rhythm: rescues, feedings, releases, losses, and beginnings. They’re never far from my hands — or my thoughts.
I’ve long believed birds are more than their bodies. They feel like messengers — totemic, flickering between worlds, bringing something ancient, something familiar. Their presence often lands in me like a forgotten song — stirring, strange, and somehow mine.
This body of work blends drawn images and digital animation. It’s not an attempt to capture birds, but to listen to them — to respond with marks and motion, to echo something of their presence through gesture and rhythm.
What changes when you make something with no one watching?
Ongoing practice
An evolving, daily drawing exploration
This is the quiet heart of my practice — daily drawing, walking, moving, noticing. The small marks. The hesitant beginnings. The unremarkable page that somehow shifts, softens, opens.
I walk the paddocks. I dance with trees. I return to my bush atelier and begin again.
There’s no product here. No finish line. Only process. Only attention.
I draw because I need to, not because someone’s looking. The work grows out of itself — uncertain, messy, alive.
work comes out of work
Richard Serra
