As with most people, at this time of year, I have had time to look back over 2009 and my achievements in my practice as an artist, and start to think about where I want to go from here.

It looks like 2010 is going to be really busy in terms of my participatory and consultancy work which is great - some really interesting and challenging pieces of work and opportunities to learn alongside children, teachers and other artists.

So I’m starting to think about what I want to focus on in more individual work, my own personal research through doing and making; what did I start in this last year that I’d like to build on, and what have I neglected that I could kick-start in the coming months?

I’m determined to spend more time outdoors and a little less on the computer, I want to explore the role of drawing and what it means to me, and I want to continue to make work which explores the value of time spent interacting with my physical, sensory environment - the landscape that I live and work in and the other ‘beings’ with whom I share it.

My work with children through initiatives such as 5×5x5=creativity, continuously reminds me of the need to support each individual to follow their own path, and to trust in their innate creativity. At times I look back to my own childhood and start to unpick where present interests came from and which ones I have left behind. Some of those that I didn’t carry on were so important to me so why did I just drop them?

Often in these moments of reflection, I get to the time in my life when I started my Fine Art degree and I see why I dropped those discarded interests, or ways of interpreting and exploring the world. My experience at college was a really valuable one, but the way that it was taught was not person-centred, or student led, it was much more a kind of channelling or grooming for a place in the art world. I think arts education has a lot to learn from the 5×5x5 model.

One thing that I am returning to more and more is drawing. One of my earliest memories is drawing birds from Tony Soper’s Bird Table Book. Drawing was something I did all the time, right through my life, until college, when it became something we did on Wednesdays, or a way of planning a piece of sculpture, or a drawing held tightly in a sketchbook.

What I want to return to is drawing as a means of exploring and making sense of the world, drawing for play, drawing for pleasure, without such a fixed end product in mind.

Wonder, the piece that I showed in the recent Salisbury Arts Centre Drawing Open, was not created as a drawing, but was exhibited as one. This has led me to start looking at different examples of drawing recently and asking other people what they think drawing is. Does anybody know?

The [1] Tracey online journal - an electronic open access journal dedicated to the presentation of drawing and the discussion of drawing practice - inspired me by its inclusion of photographs of ‘found drawings’, so when I planned to be in the studio yesterday and couldn’t get there because of snow, I went out with Moshi (our dog) and looked around me at the marks and shapes highlighted by the fresh white snow that was resting on every surface.

Are these my photos my drawings? Are my collages drawings? Is the way that I gather together information, experiences, materials and people a drawing together that is my own way of drawing?

I’m not sure at the moment, I’m just going to allow myself to play with drawing, and to see what happens - to pick back up a piece of my creative ‘toolbox’ that I felt I had lost along the way.