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AS Art Analysis Artist

Here is my Artist research on 'Debbie Locke'. Please could someone read through it and see if I have missed any key points that should be covered in an Artists Analysis?

If linework is something I wish to recreate, then the work of Debbie Locke presents lines through her work into mapping movement. As a London artist currently aged 48, her work is known for both its captivating results as well as it’s interesting technique. She uses autonomous drawing machines created from adapted children’s toys to create these intertwined, scribbled pieces.

The monochrome allows the viewer to focus solely on the marks and pathway, reflecting her wish to “map” movement, representing pathways of an ‘explorer’. Debbie Locke’s ‘explorer’ and ‘recorder’ are what she names the machines involved in her work. The machines are either floor-based, wall-based, or both, programming them with basic rules to determine their pathways - the ‘explorer’ reports its route to the ‘recorder’ via Bluetooth technology. It is this method which significantly adds to the ‘chaotic’ theme I’ve researched.
By encouraging mistakes within the makeup of the machinery, Locke sets up unpredictable results. Deviation from the prescribed paths is what arguably creates her pieces’ energetic feel, reflecting her interest into the fallibility of machinery, of which produces her record of not just movement - but also the unexpected.

If I was to disregard her installation art and view her work as the images produced, I would see these as ominous, concentrated masses of black line. Feelings of confusion and ambiguity first come to me, as it gives the idea of masking something, or of a formless entity. It was initially the convolution of the pen lines that caught my attention, that appear not entirely doodle-esque and harshly scribbled, but at the same time not entirely dainty and flowing. Locke has captured, for me, the skilful point on this spectrum where harsh, dark line works together with singular, fainter line to allow the viewer the opportunity to simultaneously recognise a grating feel as well as a more fragile intricacy. While it could be argued the concentrated darkness displays a more occupied ‘chaos’, to me it’s these outer, singular lines in their visibly, more comprehensible interlinks that show disorder.

In her series ‘Dialogue’, she uses three wall-based machines relaying messages via Bluetooth from the first recorder to the second and to the third, achieving somewhat of a ‘Chinese Whispers’ effect. Logically, each document should be identical, but due to Locke’s building of the drawing machines, this isn’t the case, thus breaking boundaries and contradicted expectation: thus, creating a more subtler, chaos. Each image has strong links to each other, as they are all based fundamentally on the same movements, are all mapping the same thing - but are uncontrollably different.

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