- Venue
- Sidcot Arts Centre
- Location
- South West England
As a ‘drawn’ animator by trade my appreciation of the parameters defining drawing has been refreshed by the latest exhibition at the impressive new art centre at Sidcot School in North Somerset. ‘Drawn in’ features contemporary drawings made by more than 40 artists from all over Britain. Selected from an open submission, it presents work made using a diverse range of media, from biros to light to spilt milk.
Alexandra Zierle and Paul Carters film ‘Spillings’ is set in Buenos Aires at the tomb of the first president; an area of poverty and alchohol abuse. We see a woman walking, as if in a trance, carrying plastic bags full of milk which slowly pour out through holes cut in the bottom. She literally draws with milk, closely followed by maybe 50 wild cats who live behind the railings surrounding the tomb. This action, which distantly echos an aboriginal way of making an offering to Pacha Mama (earth) creates milky lines of sustenance on this unforgiving ground.
Hyungi Park focuses on the act of drawing by playing with everyday materials like sellotape or tissue paper, transforming them into lines or abstract forms. The group of small framed pieces huddle together suggesting a domestic narrative.
Wendy Tuxill investigates ways of drawing with liquid porcelain, exploring it’s flexibility and limitations, in linear unravellings of 3-dimensional white line on white paper. Similarly Deborah Feiler’s ‘Bees’ feels like a maverick member of the hive has decided to record its flight-path in honey.
Some find ways of linking their medium with more emotive or dreamlike concepts: for Mark Lomax actual books become the subject matter as well as the medium for his work, which explores concepts of belonging and conformity. Lloyd Durling, who works exclusively with a biro, producing such detailed, delicate work that you hardly notice how they’re made, just the ‘fantastical, unnerving and claustrophobic’ little worlds which he creates. Sophie Woodrows’ incredibly detailed drawings of strange architectural dwellings in trees, seem to evoke the ever shifting place between fiction and reality.
The show runs until 22nd October.
