Catherine Flexen

I make visual inquiries that could be described as attempts to measure the immeasurable experiences of separation, union, and the barely perceptible spaces between. I consider my drawings, paintings and constructions to have a dual purpose: to serve a need to ground myself in the physical, natural, and cultural world while questioning the possibility of the metaphysical. In a fine art practice spanning 35 years, this endeavour has taken various forms.

To write of drawing, I sometimes describe my mainstay drawing practice, which began in the early 1990s, as a graphicalisation of pilgrimage, giving a drawn form to the experience of dislocation and a search for transformation. These drawings are at once meditative and seismographic. I call them Walking Drawings quite simply because they are readings from walking meditations. Over time, as the material outcomes of the drawings have asserted their independence, decisions about how the drawings continue become more formal, more practical, and probably more academic. Experiments around how terrain informs the drawn line and whether the drawings can produce ‘likeness’ of ground, body, and route have come to the fore. Yet the question remains, “What, in fact, am I measuring?” As an Associate Artist at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, I am engaged in several projects. One of these explores the historical identity of OCHS building premises and incorporates their ordinariness into a philosophical enquiry by making diagrammatic drawings, paired with metaphorical language, to evoke concepts of separateness, interdependence, and unity.

Catherine Flexen is an Associated Artist at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and a member of the Drawing Research Group at Arts University Bournemouth. She graduated from Chelsea College of Art & Design in 1993.