Archive Series 2010

Her new body of work foregrounds her instinct for drawing and the important part it plays in her daily practice. Not all artists draw (sadly the discipline is no longer integral to a fine art education), but those artists who do draw often tend to use their sketchbooks as a visual archive, a working image library that can enrich the preparation of more fully worked compositions.

Stayton has gone one step further by making radical interventions into her old sketchbooks with scissors and scalpels, cutting out elements and juxtaposing them to create fresh compositions. The resulting collages, some of which become a ground for further drawing, are occasionally used as source material for larger paintings.