'The Lick Drawings' Series

As the source images for my drawings, I wanted to look at common tropes of horror so I drew stills taken from (mostly) mainstream horror films. The process of drawing the images was important, I wanted a relationship between the film and the drawing so I projected the films using a data projector, paused the film at certain points, and then traced the image onto the paper behind the projected image. Developing on from my previous art practice of the mouth as a source of both desire and disgust, I began to lick the horrific element in the image to remove it. The amount of licking depended on the image itself. In some cases, it was just a small section and in others, like in the drawing from the film Carrie, in which the protagonist has blood pouring all over her face, the licking almost obscures the whole drawing. I chose different films for different reasons, but mostly because they are well known and recognised. I wanted to do this so that there was a sense of familiarity to the finished pieces, so that even though they are taken out of their context, thus disrupted and recreated, they still have some sense of ‘being seen before’; consequently creating almost an uncanny or abject experience.


The pressure of licking causes my tongue to bleed. As you can see in the images the blood creates an orangey-red tinge at each licked section. By licking the drawing, I am in a way attempting to ‘help’ the image by removing its ‘horrific’ element, but I am also giving it a part of me - something that is just as horrific. I feel that the action is a removal of the metaphorical abject into the literal.