I’m generally quite a logical person, but I’m not always methodological. Often I’ll have an idea that I want to try out, and instead of following the steps which logically come before it, I launch straight in. Maybe I’m just not that interested in the preceding steps, or maybe I’m just impatient.

Anyway, armed with some Micron fine liners I decided that rather than start again where I left off last time, I would change a few things all at once. Sometimes in my art class we will do an exercise where we draw something and then pass our work onto the next person who then adds to or modifies it. I’m not keen on this exercise, in relinquishing control to someone else, of letting someone else be a part of my work.

As drawing lines is a repetitive, controlled and focussed act, I decided that I wanted to shake it up a bit, to introduce an element of unpredictability. Whilst drawing a random outline is to all intents and purposes unpredictable, because I’ve done it so many times I suspected that I might have developed an unconscious pattern of movement, a comfortable way of doing it. So, I decided to ask my husband and daughter each to draw an outline to which I would then respond with a simple system of using the same width of pen and filling in each section with lines, ensuring the lines in adjacent sections are going in different directions. I also allowed myself the opportunity of leaving a few sections blank or treating them in a different way. I worked on A2 off white cartridge paper.

My husband’s:

This is the orientation it was drawn in and I prefer it this way as it gives it a feeling of instability, discord, of something melting. Anyway, the other way up it reads as a cyclist with a flat rear tyre.

My daughter’s:

The first thing that strikes me is the relevance of selfhood and the act of becoming. Becoming happens through entanglement with others and selfhood is shaped by those relationships, and the world around us. These images embody my relationship with the people who drew the outlines. I didn’t choose the outlines but I can choose how I respond to them, how I engage, how I attend to them. I transform the outlines with time and devotion much as I do in the relationships with my husband and daughter. They then respond to what I have done and all of us are changed by the process.

I really enjoyed making these images. The repetitive act of drawing the lines allowed me to switch off and to engage fully with the process rather than thinking about the result. I had no idea how they would turn out. The decision as to direction was made in the moment – it may not even have been a decision as such, just an intuitive adjustment of the angle of the ruler. I like that the mark-making is the subject of the images and consequently so is the process. The only active decision was which parts to leave out and how to deal with them. I love how the process is so evident – the times when the repetitive act and the sound of the pen on the paper made me lose focus and overshoot, how when I moved the ruler it left a spidery trail, how the areas where the lines cross form and edge which is at times irregular, creating a distortion, an interference, almost a vibration. Against the flat areas of colour the lines even appear to have a dynamism about them which I think is helped by the variation in tone – there are lighter areas where the pen is starting to dry up.

Whilst I was making them I felt content, as if two parts of myself were both being satisfied, balanced – the part which likes order and certainty and the other which likes the unpredictable and the unknown. There must be something about it which resonates with me because I subsequently went on to spend the following week experimenting with more images.

It would be interesting to see what the process is like by involving people who aren’t experienced with making art to see how their outlines might differ in the sense that they might be less confident and their mark making more hesitant. Also, what about strangers? How might I feel responding to outlines which have not been made by people that I know?