Drumlin Series
2015
Through the Drumlin series, I became an artist. For so long, I had made and taught furniture design. I created mostly chairs. A move to Los Angeles asked me to consider my place as an artist and designer, and I realized that I wasn’t as much “making furniture” as I was sculpting functional objects using cloth. My work was in cloth.
I asked myself, “could I create sculptural objects without a function?” And my quest began with a familiar place to start: Drumlins, the low glacial hills of Northern Ireland, where I was raised. That soft rolling countryside was a pattern where I knew how to begin.
I imagined what it might be like to run my fingers, instead of my eyes, over a surface—to think of the tactile instead of the visual. So I thought only in rhythm and proportion, and each piece of canvas constructed into undulating positive and negative patterns.
It’s said when a person loses their sight their other senses become sharper. That’s what happened here.
Johnston, 2015. 27” x 116”, unbleached canvas
New Reid, 2015. 56” x 87”, unbleached canvas
Campbell, 2015. 64” x 72”, unbleached canvas
Morrison, 2015. 62” x 42”, unbleached canvas
Hallworth, 2015. 60” x 36”, unbleached canvas
Ryan, 2015. 65” x 22”, unbleached canvas
Marley, 2015. 70” x 26”, unbleached canvas
Angus, 2015. 120” x 120”, unbleached canvas
MacCauley, 2015. 110” x 37”, unbleached canvas
MacEoin, 2015. 63” x 19”, unbleached canvas