This series of drawings was created pretty much alongside these sculptures, and explores similar ideas; with the sculptures I was physically trying to merge and entangle found objects/materials, and in the same way here I am using the outlines of these same materials to create conglomerated, ambiguous shapes. As with the sculptures this was informed primarily by Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter as she encourages an acknowledgement of the liveliness of so-called ‘inert’ nonhuman matter, something I am trying to manifest in these works.
These drawings also lead on from my previous ‘drawing presence’ pieces, with these try to use the forms’ ambiguity to start to blur the physical boundaries of objects, challenging how we tend to view the material world in discrete quanta and building uncertainty over the identity of specific objects or materials.
I like how the conglomerations almost become creature-like in places, growing and emerging from the mass (although I am hesitant to overly anthropomorphise). In some ways this is reminiscent of Donna Haraway’s ‘chthonic ones’, perhaps something I could lean into or research more overtly in future. In places I did start to add subtle tentacles in these drawings, a detail to encourage this line of thought should anyone chose to do so.
The above piece is slightly larger in scale (roughly A1 as opposed to A3) as I wanted to push myself to work on a slightly larger scale. While I think this had potential, upon reflection I think this piece would have been more successful had I composed it more similarly to the A3 drawings, having the drawing right up to the edges, growing out beyond the paper as though it can’t be confined.
As somewhat of a side note I also notice a relation between this idea of an uncapturable growth here and a similar idea behind a piece I made a few years ago – always interesting to notice an unintentional theme cropping up again in work.
I also wanted to push the ‘vibrant’ feeling further so experimented with introducing some colour:
These pieces were both created through the same process as the B&W ones but instead of just using the one colour I repeated the process with several different ones. I like how it introduces an almost sculptural element to the drawings through the idea of layers which merge and shift to become something different to what they are individually. However, as with the macro photography, there is something that feels a bit too literal about this introduction of colour, particularly with the piece on the right as it feels quite forced rather than quiet and introspective as I aim for my work to be.
In terms of situating these works in a wider contemporary art context I see them as conceptually similar to a lot of Cornelia Parker and Simon Starling’s work with their use of, and emphasis on, materials and how we might identify them. Visually I can also see similarities with the work of Donal Moloney in terms of a flat, but quite full, image place, and the process of drawing/creating 2D work from sculptures/objects.
Anna Harris 