biography
Fiona Hingston lives and works in a small village on the edge of the Mendip hills.
Much of her work has been informed by this location, in particular the fields and pathways she walks daily. Each walk becomes a space for gathering information, often subliminally, from a landscape that varies little from other areas throughout the South West. But the intimacy rooted to this particular place deepens her relationship to it; it becomes a space of memory, sights, signs and smells that accumulate through the passing of time.
‘My drawings are made on paper surfaces prepared and sealed with layered combinations that include; earth, ash, white emulsion paint, graphite, charcoal, indian ink.
The textured surface is central to the work. It took me a while to appreciate that one surface mixture will not do for every drawing, so there is often a lot of experimentation before the surface feels right.
Once prepared, drawings are developed by erasing this surface using a variety of tools. The image is drawn with a knife blade and improvised tools. I’m constantly finding new tools to work with, like the adapted craft drill I use as an eraser and lengths of willow stick with wire wool attached at the end used for scraping. I add colour to the drawings (occasionally) with coloured pencil.
Scraping back, excavating, constantly revealing and refining the subject and exposing stains and imperfections over what can be long periods of time, embeds an image both in the paper and in my mind. It takes time to experiment, fail, reflect, abandon, remake – leading to an accumulation of knowledge (through the investigation of materials, medium and process) that allows things to reveal themselves. This is the most frustrating time as I try to make the connection between surface and subject. Often drawings will hang around for months, occasionally years and then be reworked.’