Research question
How can embodied drawing practices negotiate the relationships between self, body and natural environments?

Methodology and project aims
In this practice-based enquiry, the artist uses drawing and installation to provoke affective encounters between her own body, art making materials and outdoor environments based on New Materialist understandings of material engagement. In such acts of art-making, marks are being left on bodies, materials become re-configurated, and boundaries and differentiations between self and entities in the environment are formed.
The creative practice aims to expose how our relationship with environments is determined by the tensions that arise from understanding our engagement with it as primary, singular events or as mediated experiences that demand representation and interpretation. Exhibited artworks point to the visceral dimensions of the self-environment relationship in order to question the way we categorise our connections to the natural world.
The artist’s unique spatial experience of the art making event is seen as an exemplary source for understanding the self-environment relationship as it is determined by the performative forces at play.

Creative project strategies
The artist uses a mobile working kit to make drawings and installation and also explores the outdoors through running and walking to provoke experiences between body, weather and atmosphere, art materials, sky and ground.
Art-making occurs in the temporal context of ‘art-making events’. These are documented by videos, photographs and drawings and then assembled to from composite artworks within an exhibition space or on a digital platform.

Conclusions
The creative practice develops its own material and process agency that co-influences the self-environment relationship.

Art-making performs its own rhythms and currents on outdoor environments which are already characterised by continuous change and becoming.