Diagrammatic Drawings: The Train Track and the Basket

On my studio table a range of books and articles on weave and basket making provide comprehensive chronicles of specialist woven construction techniques. I am interested in the drawings capacity to represent the symbolic significance of the internal woven basket structure as a place holder for some of the factual and semi fictional histories of transmigration that a basket embodies. Thus, as dissections these diagrammatic drawings have inserted into them my own notional fibres constructed from multiple photographs of train tracks pasted into longitudinal composite images. This process, akin to collage, is to imaginatively position a train track inside the diagrammatic space of a basket so that the train track is part of the journey towards understanding the basket as an object of analysis for carrying a range of meanings and skills in the movement of its fibres. Perhaps the challenge here, within this artwork, is to try to explore what a woven structure can do for me when I treat it as if it were a concept that offers up a new perspective of transmigration. On first glance a diagrammatic drawing appears to be a simplified representation of a more complex internal structure. The leap inside the diagrammatic drawing as if it were a place for movement, allows the basket to be understood both within and beyond the formal language of construction. Its internal structure is a journey of interwoven fibres derived from the landscapes from which they grow. Through placing the images I have taken of train tracks at stations in UK and mainland Europe into the diagrammatic outline of these fibres conveys an organisation of specific experiences dispersing around the form that are no longer connected to one location. In some way I am reimagining the structure of the basket and then dramatizing its production.