DRAWING:

James Brooks, Layla Curtis, Claude Heath, Maria Lalic and Jem Southam
30 October – 29 November

The exhibition includes work by some of the most interesting and accomplished contemporary British artists working today. Drawing represents an integral and vital component in the practice of each; and this exhibition looks at the differences, and dialogue, between their approaches to it; their different interests and the different ways they manipulate their ideas into images.

The tools used by artists to make drawings have always changed. “It really doesn’t matter whether we choose to scratch with a rock..., move a mouse about a pad, harvest images with a camera or simply draw with a pencil on paper, because, in the end, drawing is the concrete evidence of a thought process, not an activity that is better done with a pencil than a computer” (Stephen Farthing).

Drawing is no longer perceived as a preliminary stage on the way to achieving something else, but is significant in its own right. “Contemporary drawing has won itself the dual position of being both embryonic and realised idea. Its newfound position within contemporary practice is certainly one of vibrancy and vitality” (James Brooks).

James Brooks Helen Sumpter wrote that “Suffusing all his work is an inventive and considered exploration of drawing – drawing lines across time, drawing in rhythm, drawing out colour, and drawing attention away from what is most obvious, to see what else lies beneath.” And he draws out the subject too; removing information, changing the information available to the viewer. The drawings included in the exhibition are each familiar icons from popular culture in the twentieth century. They are stylised and abstracted, elegant and laboriously mapped, like print-outs from early computers.

Layla Curtis The work is from Polar Wandering: an interactive web based project recording her three months journey to and from Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey in 2005-2006. Every detail was tracked with the aid of a hand-held GPS device and the data uploaded on a daily basis to a website. The exhibition includes screenprints of these GPS digital drawings.
Claude Heath Acrobat has been made using stereoscope image cards of street performers in nineteenth century Paris. Stereoscopic imaging software plots the form in space, and Heath uses the data to map the figure on to the paper. He draws by removing graphite from the paper to create the illusion of depth: a 2-D interpretation of the 3-D drawing.

Maria Lalić Her work is based on pragmatic decision-making and attention to the qualities of the graphite on paper – what Donald Judd called the “obdurate identity of a material”. The closer she is to the objective, in terms of the natural qualities of the materials and consistency of a strictly regulated process of working, the closer she gets to an emotional and poetic power. We will exhibit the drawings: 2B/2H, and 7B/7H, from the Range series.

Jem Southam The contact prints in the exhibition are from the series, The Painter’s Pool. The photographs were taken in ancient woodland near Exeter, in Devon, where the painter, Mike Garton, went each day, for twenty years. After finding a fallen tree had redirected a stream, he dug out a pond, and secretly maintained it for years, only painting it a few years ago, just before he died. Southam began to photograph the pond around the time that Garton became ill. The early photographs show subtle signs of Garton’s presence - wooden poles, an easel, pieces of string – but as time went on, he was no longer able to work in the wood, and it was gradually reclaimed in to the fabric of natural environment. This series – like all Southam’s series - is about his preoccupation with the process of change, and with what Andy Grundberg calls an “acceptance of the ambiguities of human interaction with the natural world”.