Contact: Learning to Crawl

In this ongoing project I have sought to picture the patches of contact between my daughter's body and the floor as she learnt to crawl. The work explores the imaginative leaps required to envisage positive/negative mark-making through contact in printmaking, and the way that learning to move is essential to the construction of mental narratives. Along with self-propulsion comes a whole host of other developmental transformations. The more she moves, the more she can exercise choice and act as an experimenter testing out how the world works. Movement begets repetition, which begets pattern formation, which begets meaning. The project was also informed by my thinking about the pictorial role of Renaissance putti, who often feature as neither narrative figures nor pure ornaments.