Something That Grew From Nothing
(Studio note: drawings made with digital encaustic brushes built from beeswax + stone textures)
I live on a farm in the Scottish Highlands. My sister lives in a little wooden cabin close by. Sometimes, as a mother of three, the most reliable way to get a moment of quiet is to walk up there. It’s a space where I can be myself without interruption, and where I don’t have to be “on.” My sister doesn’t try to fix anything. She just lets me be.
One day I was sitting there, hunched over and hugging my knees. In that moment I had an odd thought: this posture would be interesting to draw. Not because I wanted to aestheticise the moment, and not because I wanted to wallow, but because the shape felt like an honest form of observation. I handed my sister my phone and asked her to take a photo of me. That image became the starting point for a self-portrait.
It’s taken me a long time to admit this, but drawing is a root of my practice. In my CSM portfolio I made a conscious choice not to include drawing at all. Now I’m returning to it, not as “skill,” but as a way to record what the body knows.
Digital encaustic, made from my materials
These drawings are made in Procreate using digital encaustic brushes I built from textures taken from my own environment: beeswax from my hives and stones from the land. I start by laying down a soft grey ground, rubbing it with my fingers, letting pressure and touch leave their own evidence. Then I work subtractively, removing tone rather than constantly adding more. I’m careful not to take too much away. The midtones are the atmosphere. I want only a few areas of stark white, so that brightness has meaning.
This process feels strangely close to printmaking. The marks I remove can behave like an etching plate, and the drawing starts to function as a kind of pre-plate: a surface shaped by abrasion, pressure, restraint. I’m drawn to that because I love the labour and physicality of printmaking, but I also need a surface that lets me re-enter and rework. The iPad, with the Apple Pencil’s pressure and tilt sensitivity, becomes surprisingly tactile and intuitive. It records the body even while it’s digital.
Sunflowers as masks
From this self-portrait, the sunflowers arrived. I grew them myself, dried them, and drew them from life. That matters, because the flowers carry labour and time, the repetitive care of growing something from nothing.
In the work, the dried sunflowers become a symbol for the many faces I put out into the world. They’re masks of competence and presence, the expectation of perpetual giving that often sits around women and mothers. Because they’re dried, they feel eternal: always blooming, always on, always ready to face whatever comes.
The ordinary as profound
I keep coming back to something simple: profound moments don’t always happen in “profound” places. A cabin. A body folded in grief. A flower grown from the same soil you walk on every day. The drawing is an attempt to communicate something wordless: an emotional language that passes from human to human without needing explanation.
I’m interested in the myth that creativity requires ideal conditions: space, silence, retreats. When you’re caring for others, those conditions are often unavailable. So I’m trying to treat creativity itself as a form of nurture: a source you can tap even when the tank feels empty.
Creativity, for me, is resilient. It finds a crack in poor soil and grows anyway. Sometimes it feeds itself and becomes a source of resilience.
Next experiment
My next step is to test translation: drawings like these moving toward photogravure, where pressure, ink, and paper can carry the same atmosphere. I want to find out what survives when a digital “plate” becomes a physical one.