Drawn to Carbon: Virtual ‘Meet the Artists’ session

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Jeanette Barnes creates a paradoxical space where movement is drawn into stasis and yet the new dimension she opens on the flat paper is spilling with movement, rhythm and a vibration of its own.

Paul Brandford draws from the media, news and contemporary history, to freeze moments and hold them up to our scrutiny. They are reflexive, political, and yet the narrative is not determined; ultimately, they are a call for the viewer to position themselves.

Rebecca Lyne fragments and reconstructs the body, drawing from observation and mythology to fuel her exploration of the construction of meaning in two-dimensions and to suggest new ways of looking at ourselves.

Nan Qiao’s ethereal figures, laid bare for us to observe, seem to float and yet their level of connectedness and isolation becomes an integral part of the emotional resonance that each piece transmits.

Gabriel Schmitz often works with dancers and the gestural qualities of the drawing parallel the movement of the dancers. It is easy to imagine both the model and the artist in continual movement; an invitation for the viewer to participate in the choreography.

Emma Vidal takes her engagement with the world into a parallel realm creating a new mythological spere we recognise and yet know is the stuff of fictions, allowing us to re-evaluate the interactions of the characters on the drawn stage.

Drawing is an essential, foundational and illusively simple act. If painting can be understood as a direct bridge between the agency of the maker and the agency of the viewer, and consequently privileged as an embodied artform that straddles different ages, then drawing fulfils this at an even more primal level. Again, we find that drawing is a three-way path between the represented, the hand and the mind; maybe more accurately, a direct shortcut.

Drawn to Carbon shows six contemporary artists engaging with the flattening and the immediacy drawing offers, highlighting it as a vehicle for expressing both the strength and the fragility of the human condition.