On Looking (2011) Forty graphite on paper drawings Each: 10 x 10” (25.5 x 25.5 cm)
A series of drawings focussed on the performative dimension of viewing art.
This work was made in response to the experience of navigating exhibition spaces while visiting the Venice Biennale, noticing myself and others stop to view some artworks at a distance as if meeting an invisible barrier, elsewhere leaning in to scrutinise, shuffling sideways in synchrony, meandering or peering through gaps in the crowd.
Only viewers are depicted within a blank page space – an approach motivated by a recurring interest in the spatial relationship between marked and unmarked areas in painting and drawing. In making this series I was curious about the extent to which the unmarked pictorial space inherits a scale, shape or ambience from the drawn elements.
