Net (2014) video installation, York st Mary's York.
Net
My MA dissertation was written as a ghost story. It was about the Nottingham lace trade, family history and disappearance — and the process of writing it sent me back to thinking about lace itself, specifically how you can tell handmade lace from machine-made lace by its mistakes. The errors made by human hands are random, distributed unpredictably across the work. The errors made by a machine repeat in exactly the same place, every time.
From that starting point I began drawing — repeating the same lines freely, not carefully — and discovered that the accumulated error built up into something the eye reads as flowing lace. A three-dimensional textile conjured entirely from drift and deviation. No single line is accurate. Together they produce an illusion of depth and movement that no precisely repeated line could achieve. The effect wasn't planned but arrived at: made unconsciously rather than consciously, through sustained repetition itself.
The work exists in two forms: as a live performance, where the drawing happens in front of an audience in real time, and as a film installation, where the process is distilled into a single moving image. In both cases what you are watching is the hand at work — the labour of making, the trace of a body in time.
NET was shown at York St Mary's, York, and was longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2014.
