Drawing : Sculpture

Drawing has always been an essential tool to the sculptor, and many sculptors have carried their experimentation with materials into work on paper. For many sculptors there is a clear demarcation between the two disciplines, and many sculptors make drawings that are autonomous, and independent of their work in three dimensions. The practice of drawing and of sculpture is intimately linked in the practice of these international artists. The point at which an artwork becomes a sculpture as distinct from a drawing can, in instances, be blurred.

Some of the artists produce works on paper that fall within the more traditional definition of drawing. Yet it is rare for these works on paper to be exhibited in isolation from the 3-D work – there is reciprocity between the two.

Anna Barriball and Dan Shaw-Town share an employment of repetitive graphite mark-making.  This attention to process and the passage of time is countered by the formal strategies of Minimalism such as the employment of rectilinear shapes, the grid and serialisation.  Sara Barker and Aleana Egan use line to negotiate responses to visual and literary influences and to conjure open yet resolved forms.  Knut Henrik Henriksen has an interest in questioning and redefining architectural spaces, paying particular attention to the in-between and contradictory, and leaving the work open to adaption to different environments. Alice Channer and Bojan Šarcevic create works that are hard to define, incorporating a wide range of materials and procedures that pay attention to details, combining the domestic, the body and the mechanical.

The artists are using prosaic, timeless materials such as cardboard, graphite, fabric, soot, paint, brass, thread and watercolour. The pre-fabricated and the hand-made are combined seamlessly in works that challenge artifice and celebrate how the work is constructed. The works appeal to the tactile and optical dimensions that drawing and sculpture share. In the work of each artist there is a fusing of opposites – inside and outside, objective and subjective, bodily and ascetic – and a consideration of in between, discursive spaces. The works articulate a contest between formalism and conceptualism and the exhibition investigates the interplay between an attention to surface and material and attention to line and form.