The Drawing Stage : The Mark that Functions/Comes into a Mediality/Form/Language

Outpost 210524

Light Drawings/Duration/Surface/Intermediaries.

Drawing/Inscriptions/Mediality/Conversation

I created 'False Divisions' in an effort to name the parts which in practice are so multifaceted as to continuously express the existence of all others.

What defines/constitutes drawing? 

One thinks of its properties, line, marks, surfaces, its characteristic colourlessness, its acts, gestures, rhythms and spaces of thought.

Avis Newman.

The Stage Of Drawing-Gesture-And-Acts.

Avis Newman.

Catherine de Zegher.

As I made my choices, the body of the exhibition grew as an assemblage of parts comprising groups within groups, clusters, pairs, singularities, a 'body of relations' as one might understand a body of thought. In the selection and organisation, I tried to suggest that drawing is by definition in a state of flux finding inspiration in 'modes of thought' that are not linear. But which propose a space of fluctuations and overlapping relationships and allow for an uncertainty and a play between parts as in Melanie Klein's formulations of positions.

Drawing, draws us in close, into an act of scrutiny, retracing the drawer's movements between hand and eye is one of the profound pleasures of looking which connects us to a recognition of our own past acts. When we look, we enter the intimate space of a work that is as close to the action of an artist's thought as one can get.

Avis Newman understands drawing more fundamentally as to evidence the materialization of an act of consciousness, where a gestural act, embodies an act of thought. Her concern has been with the visual traces of those phenomena, which are embedded in all our actions and ultimately connect us through language.

In the inscriptive act of drawing there exists the shadow of our ambivalent relation to making marks, before the time when 'image' and 'text' are differentiated to go their separate ways. When one looks at a drawing there is a consciousness of the ghost of the 'text' in the 'image' in the Image. It is that combination of events where the mind simultaneously perceives in a single stroke the registration of a gesture affirming the existence of another, a line of delineation that speaks of this or that and the mark that functions (comes into a mediality) as a sign which possibly is connected to other signs. In such circumstances thoughts float between reading and perceiving. It is in this inscriptive nature of the activity of drawing that can hold we can hold in suspension this differentiated state of consciousness, irrespective of what is being drawn.

Generative Forms.

Drawing Assemblages.

Germ Cell/Idea/Breath.

The synthesis of Geometric with Organic Forms.

Christopher Wilmarth

Nine Clearing Works.

A portal, an architectural entranceway.

Wilmarth continually examined the concept of duality, contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality and ethereality. He employed a 'painterly technique' that emphasized the tactility and richness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform.

His sculptures retain the spiritual implications of 'place' endowed with particular qualities of light, clearings that can create a release, where light can open even when the place remains the same, just like the mind and new thoughts, creating moments of these pavement epiphanies of confinement and release.

Works from 1985 onwards contain and further develop a figurative impulse ( re-emerging of the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes) with the larger more emphatically abstract 'places'. Fusing the organic with the geometric and conjuring a multitude of symbols, head-soul-heart-aura-egg-germ cell-womb-cup.

Laura Rosenstock. 1989

A Clearing for a Standing Man. 1974

Poetics of place and person articulated by the evocative power of light.

He endowed his sculptures with a sense of  'Place' and 'Person' which was critical to his intension as was his lifelong concern with the evocative power of light.

Light gains character as it touches the world, from what is lighted and who is there to see. I associate the significant moments of my life with the character of light at the time. The universal implications of my original experience have located in and become signified by kinds of light. My sculptures are places to generate this experience compressed into light and shadow and return them to the world as a physical poem.

On Mallarmé, Wilmarth notes that his imagination and reverie meant more to him than anything  that was actually of this world. His work is about the anguish and longing of experience not fully realized, and Wilmarth found something of himself in it, especially the feeling that for Mallarmé 'the essence of a work consists precisely in what is not expressed'.  

Christopher Wilmarth. 

Christina Iglesias.

Shelters

Ceramics of Organic Abstraction.

A loosely defined style characterised by an ongoing exploration of biomorphic or organic form and surface.

Garth Clark.

Rising Above The Polemic : Organic Abstraction in British Ceramics. 1995.

References to landscape and natural phenomena, nature's associations of fecundity, earthiness, process, growth and decay.

Gordon Baldwin.