My background in Architecture has instilled in me the importance of people and place, and the significance that one’s environment, has on their understanding of community and creativity. The architect Sarah Wrigglesworth has informed the way in which I have developed my ongoing investigations of buildings through recording, measurement and drawing by hand. She comments that, ‘To capture something as large as a building on the size of a piece of paper, architects work to a reduced scale, using symbols and codes to represent the world’. She has considered, as I have, ‘How to use the conventions of architectural drawings to describe space as a lived experience rather than as a static or predictable moment of perfection’.
In 2018, my Drawing at the Royal Scottish Academy Open Show was awarded ‘The Summerhall Award’, giving me the opportunity to exhibit work at the Edinburgh arts venue. On visiting Summerhall, I wanted to create a new body of drawings, surveying the campus, it’s scale, variety and character. The Summerhall Drawings demonstrate an honest, observant and perceptive approach to this unique historic site, exhibited and recorded through carefully constructed scale drawings with pen, atmospherically inhabited with watercolour. Applying Architectural Conventions of Plan, Section, Elevation and Scale enable me to investigate spacial qualities of the former University of Edinburgh Vet School, and how the scale, layout and nature of the building has allowed it’s successful adaption and transformation as ‘a vibrant cultural village in the heart of Edinburgh’.
The objects of my study are recorded as a lived in experience, as I found it on when visiting. Furniture, finishes and further ephemera are all depicted. The drawings produced accurately show the nature and variety of spaces, and the forensic detail show their character; allowing the viewer to engage in the subject matter in a new way, and to consider further the quality, range and beauty of places and spaces within Summerhall, that allow, support and enhance ‘things happening, all kinds of interesting, wonderful and downright inspiring things’.
