Mandy Bonnell
OSGF
Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session IV
Mandy Bonnell is a printmaker and contemporary artist investigating the connections that lie between drawing and stitch, combining a variety of traditional craft techniques with contemporary drawing and printmaking processes.
She explores mark making on an intimate scale using careful precision to create skeletal structures inspired by the natural world and textile samples. As well as responding to the natural world, her imagery draws on eighteenth and nineteenth century textile samples of embroidery and lace and she incorporates typographic punctuation marks transferred into different pattern formations to form a narrative. The time it takes to produce these sequences unites the pursuit of hand-stitched needlepoint while utilizing a repeated mark within a non-repeated pattern.
Her work is a response to self-taught eighteenth and nineteenth century women artists and naturalists, to acknowledge forgotten artists, whose images are lasting examples of plants and insects now extinct and provide insight into the attitudes and practices of women at the time. She aims to establish an on-going visual and tactile dialogue with the past and interpret this through contemporary drawing and printmaking methods.