37drawings

Lady McCrady I draw two opposite ways.

Tom Ngo I’ve been a practicing visual artist working fulltime as an architect since 2008. An undercurrent within my work is examining the intersection between art and architecture. I believe the two are not mutually exclusive. This recent work examines one of the primary tasks of an architect – defining space. I’ve taken the measurements of the publication, in this case (2) - 9” x 13” and re-established them to highlight the act of space defining. The communication of this is important to me for a couple reasons. The first is that one can recreate this space if inclined, which is the instructive part of an architectural drawing. The second is it displays the space at 1:1. The immediacy of showing the dimensions of the paper space avoids a reinterpretation that may occur when depicting spaces and structures of different scales. The issue of immediacy does not plague works of art as they are typically the final outcome. Most of the arguments of why architecture and art are not the same stem from the idea that architecture is functional. With this work I am attempting to reframe and highlight the functional aspects of architectural representation and reframe them as a creative gesture. One is on impulse. I see something notable and visual. I’m walking or it’s out a public transport window. I scratch it onto scraps, receipts or book interior pages, which later intrigues me about the timing. Or it’s on Smith’s stationers Basildon Bond airmail paper I horde from rare trips to the UK and carry in my bag. I only use a knife-chiseled Ebony pencil. It’s inside a London souvenir pencil case with cliché London landmarks on it, which, au verso, says in fluorescent pink Juliet . Back in the studio I scribble-in the color: I don’t like to fuss. Color abbreviations are Ye - yellow, Ma - magenta, Go - glowing gold light. The Prismacolor pencils are in a cedar-smelling Spanish cigar box. Two - in the studio vertically on big body size-related paper. This is about the pleasure of a sweeping motion of the arm in lyrical, curving, flowing tides of marks. Charcoal floats down the surface of the paper and attaches or makes a strip at the bottom that has to be vacuumed. Actually, third is with liquid-ish paint, and long brushes with long animal hairs. My elbow is glued to my hip as I stand over a low table with large Arches Platine paper or metal litho plates. Drawing is a direct expression of the mind in a trance.

Drawing 045: TreeSawArborist- WorkerCone. 30h x 22w. 2012

Seher Shah ‘Throughout her practice, Seher Shah has consistently re-shaped representation. Working with both drawing and sculpture, she has revisited the mainstays of architectural representational methods — plan, elevation, section — to inject unsettling slippages into their rigorous formalism. Materiality is central to The Lightness of Mass — the deposit of ink on paper, the coarseness of sand cast iron, even the drawn line operates as an almost palpable material component in large-scale drawings. The Unit Object etchings liberate classic architectural representations from their restrictive process of perspective drawing, introducing them into a fluid dance of line and the material corporeality of ink.’ — Excerpt taken from the exhibition text for The Lightness of Mass at Green Art Gallery, Dubai, 2016

Unit Object (sculpture garden) Portfolio of 7, Etching and aquatint on paper, 23 x 26 “, 2014 Published at the Glasgow Print Studio; installation view: the Lightness of Mass, Green Art Gallery, Dubai, 2016

Jacob Whibley Drawing for me will always be interstitial - a Darwinian process that occupies the space between thought and final form. It is a convoluted narrative & process: this collage/drawing was 3 years in the making. The initial panel, the blank support, was built and then forgotten behind a pile of half finished sculptures and storage tubs. It was rediscovered in January 2020. i hung it on my wall with a few other unfinished pieces, holding up some scrap pieces of paper to it, and waiting to see if any of them felt like committing themselves to the surface - none did. Then when sorting through a pile of paper found a stack of old photo album pages: photos long removed, memories disappeared but the glue that had fixed them to the sheets held on tight, leaving rough scraps (ghost traces) behind. The pages were a perfect neutral ground to work off of, the traces provided a compositional problem to work around or with, and there were these tabbed sides with holes punched out of them that were an intriguing detail - so I secured them to the panel and emphasised the tabs by allowing them to jut out. Then it sat on the wall for another month. And then in early April splitting my time between sorting old work and digging through stacks of paper, I took a break and came across an article on desire paths, read it, and then looked over at the panel and imagined a looping swirling network of sculptural paper lines that wove their way along the surface and through the punched holes… I finished cutting and gluing the lines down within an hour. And there you go - a long and circuitous path to a long and circuitous solution.

Chemin du désir 15 x 18'

38

on site review 37: drawings

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