Solo exhibition announced! Join my mailing list for your invitation to the Private View.
I’m thrilled to announce my solo show Wayfaring at Fitzrovia Gallery, 139 Whitfield Street, London, W1T 5EN. Open daily, 12-6pm, 18th - 28th October 2023. Closed Monday. (Please note change to closing date).
Anthropologist Tim Ingold describes wayfaring as a process whereby a person moves through a landscape whilst maintaining an ‘active engagement with the country that opens up along [their] path’ (Lines, A brief History, 2007. Routledge Classics, 2016, p.78). It’s a description which feels very relevant to the way I mentally travel through space as I draw. I’m discovering each landscape gradually, as if feeling my way through the dark, rather than creating a perspectival plan of the entire space from a fixed viewpoint at the outset of the drawing.
My love of Early Netherlandish painting, especially the compressed space, multiple viewpoints and succession of closely observed details within Robert Campin’s domestic interiors and Rogier van der Weyden’s The Seven Sacraments has also fed into my drawn spatial journeys.
The show will include two groups of drawings. The first made at home during the pandemic, the second made over the past year, looking out from my fifth floor studio within Westminster Industrial Estate behind the Thames Barrier, south east London.
At first glance they are very distinct sets of drawings but wayfaring, as a method of negotiating space, is vital to both.
Each drawing is made over several days, sometimes weeks or months, so they incorporate changes in season, weather and time of day. They are also records of the events taking place which I notice whilst drawing. I’m drawing the world ‘in progress’ and using my drawing process to reveal the continually evolving story of place inherent to each location. Discover more about the show here.
‘Act’, graphite on paper, 42 x 59.4 cm, 2023. Photo credit: John Howard Davies