I found a lot of what she was saying was really interesting. For example, she trained in stone carving and restoration and in her early work she was making very labour intensive stone sculptures depicting scenes from her childhood etc. which would take weeks and weeks to make. She would display them in galleries, two or three of these sculptures in a room, but the work was really about the connection and the tension between the pieces. So her tutor asked her one day, do you really need the figures? And she realised that she didn't. So she stopped making stone carvings and focused on this "nothing" in between them, and this is what she has be working with ever since.
I also liked that when she takes her work down from an exhibition, she keeps the "clumps" of tape in her studio as works themselves, or she gives them away to friends.
Garrett Phelan: Roving Roding Woodcock on Reconnaissance
As for the rest of the exhibition, The End of the Line: Attitudes in Drawing, I was slightly disappointed. Some of it I really loved , eg. Garat Phelan's "Battle for Birds" installation, and Monika Grzymala's tape piece that spanned both floors of the gallery.
But for a "contemporary drawing" exhibition, there not a lot else very exciting going on. There were quite a number of photorealistic drawings from a few of the artists, and I'm just not into that. I mean, once you have got over the "wow it looks so realistic, it must have taken ages" then I just don't find them that interesting. Just show us the photo you drew it from, it's less tiring to look at. If you have a photo, why do we need the drawing if you're just going to copy it? Plus it's way to easy for photorealistic drawings and paintings just to look plain cheesy.
So anyway, I will most likely go see this exhibition again at some point and maybe I'll change my mind. I just think for an exhibition about "Attitudes in Drawing" the majority of the drawings just weren't all that ground breaking or varied.
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