My figurative drawing practice follows a highly methodical set of steps, exploring the act of making as both deeply intentional and subliminally shaped by its physical context. Through a repetition of process, I engage in a meditative ritual of creation that responds to my direct environment. The immediacy of drawing is critical to this. In ‘Songs of Praise’, the underlying layers of watercolour and ink irreversibly stain the paper and shape the slower, more deliberate pencil marks that follow to create a work that is built on an immediate response to place, then transforms into a reflection upon that moment in time. The act of drawing therefore becomes the gentle persuasion of abstraction into form; a meditation on sense and meaning-making. The resulting work is self-reflexive, an act of creation that tracks the speculative growth of the self from youth to womanhood to old age.