‘The Journey of Our Parallel Lives’ is one of three new artworks which will be on display at The Lightbox in Woking, UK as part of the Royal Society of Sculptors’ exhibition: Parallel Lines: Drawing and Sculpture. The piece was made in response to Kenneth Armitage’s artwork ‘Walking Group’. It will also be exhibited alongside Armitage’s piece as well as works by other great masters such as Dame Barbara Hepworth, Sir Anthony Caro, John Behan, Michael Ayrton, Lynn Chadwick, Eduardo Paolozzi.

Find out more about the exhibition here.

Exhibition runs: 22nd June - 25th August 2019

About the work

Armitage was an artist who felt connected to his Irish heritage. Since moving to Ireland I have been fascinated by the pull of Ireland’s countryside to artists. I take walks all across the country and started keeping an abstract map. I noticed that every walk in the same place is different either in the experience, or in the particular path which seems to open up to my feet. At the same time, my courses run in parallel to each other, starting and ending together. These drawings represent movement, mapping the body’s course. I observe the feet never tracing the same route twice, and I understand that we all experience life differently even from the same path.

In his sculpture Armitage was interested in bucking the patterns he observed in life - the horizontals and verticals which we must fit into - by making his walkers exist on a slant to “run across the rigid pattern”. My work takes this further by introducing a curve, the dots which make up each line representing a footstep, a moment, a thought. My drawings are created by burning the surface of calligraphy paper: My medium is the charcoal brown as the paper changes state.