I was a teacher for many years, working with BA, MA and PhD art/design students in the US and UK. I’m originally from Minneapolis but now live in London.
'Day Return to Brighton' was a diary project of over a thousand drawings on used train tickets from my daily commute from London to Brighton. When I started the series I set a few ground rules to help me remember what was important in the work. I limited the drawing materials to pencil, pen (black and blue ink only) and Tipp -Ex (white correction fluid), which kept the project portable. I never threw tickets away: if I made a mistake I continued to work on it until I was left with something I liked or could use, which might mean ending up with a virtually black ticket if things went badly wrong. For the most part I tried to work with mistakes, remembering that I was allowed some less than wonderful tickets over the long haul. Also, every ticket used in the series had to be mine, and only those used for my daily commute to Brighton. This reinforced my initial objective, which was to try to find a positive way to acknowledge the time and money invested in commuting. Each ticket represented one day of my working life.