Share your work

Recently, I exhibited a new series of drawings that I spent several months making, and from this show I gained a lot of very encouraging feedback. Being a creative person, whatever medium you use, means that you open some vulnerability in yourself. It is this that enables you to make something that resonates with other people, but it can be daunting to share the work with others. You always hope that other people will appreciate what you are trying to do or say with something you have made… but you never know until it’s out there!

Last autumn, artist coach Ceri Hand helped me to see that setting myself a challenge to make new work could help me to move forward with the project I’m working on. I have an uncomfortable relationship with my own drawings, and I haven’t often shared them as finished pieces of work. They are more usually created as preliminary pieces, made while I work up an idea that will become an animation or installation.

 

Since I started a project about my childhood, growing up on a series of circuses where my family worked, I have been exploring my memories through drawing and writing. During an online group coaching session with Ceri, I set myself a target of drawing as often as possible for three months, using different papers and materials. The idea was to stop worrying so much about creating a perfectly executed drawing and to see it as an everyday activity. Doing this would create a collection of work that I could look at after the three months were up, in order to decide where to go next.

 

The subject of each drawing was chosen from our archive of family snaps and other images sourced online, many through social media groups that have been formed around particular circuses and time periods. I have been choosing an image that interests me, and that connects to a personal memory, before deciding what format to use for the drawing. Many of the resulting drawings are on a buff-coloured paper with a slight roughness to its surface, using charcoal or pencil. A couple of the sketches use colour, many are monochrome, and a few are on black paper, drawn with white pastel and Conté pencil.

Christening on an elephant, charcoal on paper

I was trying to capture a sense of memory: that elusiveness that allows us to remember, but which can disappear if we try to grasp it too tightly. At the same time, I was writing down my memories, working in a parallel way: the drawing would stimulate some writing, which sparked another drawing, and so on. I have never worked in this way before and it has been very rewarding, carrying with it a sense of enjoyment of this new process.

 

After the three-months of my self-set deadline, I looked at what I had and found that there was a collection of drawings that formed their own kind of dialogue with one another. During this same period of time, Imposure, a group of artists I’ve been working with for over two years, had an opportunity to have our own exhibition. With a prod from Ceri, I decided that I would show the drawings. Ceri suggested that I treat the show like a ‘studio visit’ and ask visitors for their feedback. A daunting, yet interesting, idea!

 

After a lot of planning, we held our inaugural Imposure show at Artlandish, a temporary artist-led space in Hereford, and I included the request for feedback in my artist’s wall text, as well as sending it out in my newsletter. I hung the sixteen drawings in frames, in a large group that was purposely unevenly spaced (inspired by some of Annette Messager’s installations of images). It was interesting to see the way that drawings worked with one another when displayed in this way. I didn’t want them to seem like a 'neat' set, bound to tight parameters, but to spark new connections with one another and allow the eye to be drawn to different places.

Circus drawings in Imposure exhibition at Artlandish, 2025

 

I had a lot of conversations during the exhibition with people, often about which images resonated personally with them. Several people were drawn to the sense of mystery in a drawing I made of a human and a chimp holding hands. Some people found a particular resonance in my drawing of a tree, and I spoke to people who remembered riding ponies when they were younger. 

 

I was very pleased to hear from a young woman that, in the loose and mainly undetailed style of the drawings, “You have captured how I remember my own childhood”.

 

Someone spoke about the soft quality of the lines in the drawings and how they engendered a “real sense of movement”, which I was very pleased to hear. In the past, I have often felt frustrated when my drawings have been too tight and controlled, so this way of approaching drawing regularly and without expectations has been a good way to get around that.

 

Visitors wanted to hear the stories of life on the circus behind the drawings, but the drawings themselves resonated with many people, which is what I was hoping for. It is a series of work that is very personal to me but also taps into something more universal. This show has been a valuable lesson in challenging my own fears about showing new work and asking directly for feedback. 

 

The conversations I had were rich, rewarding and positive. The knowledge that my work allows people to find a sense of the essence of memory that chimes with their own experiences helps to assure me that I am moving in a good direction.

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Useful info: Ceri Hand runs an online coaching network for artists, which I find very useful and supportive https://cerihand.com/membership/