Fragments of a Male Nude with One Knee Kneeling on a Plinth.

Responding to William Willes (c.1775 - 1851), Male Nude with One Knee Kneeling on a Plinth, this work explores the space between reproduction, imitation andauthenticity. Originally used as teaching aids the original drawings would have been copied by multiple students, multiple times, over many years. Ideas surrounding reproduction and restoration are common themes in my work and this response serves as a present-day copy that combines new technologies with handmade elements. Through a process of digital manipulation, re-appropriation and reproduction, which I have dubbed ‘serendipitous digital drawing’, this work creates iconographically unstable images that can be assembled and recombined to yield fresh meanings and interpretations. the material investigations feed into these ideas while also examining the implications of making art through automated means. I use laser cutting technologies in ways that allow me to retain control of the mark making, layering and manipulating images and combining them with wooden supports and plinths to create a kind of sculptural extrapolation of space that brings the drawing back to its original context, a playful spatial assemblage that replicates the life drawing set up allowing the viewer to question assumptions of authenticity within the image itself and the perception of automated art production.