A Line Around an Idea

Artists: Pablo Bronstein, Felicity Clear, İnci Eviner, Helen Farrell, Rachel Goodyear, Julie Merriman, O’Donnell + Tuomey, Dan Perjovschi, plattenbaustudio, Rinus Van de Velde, Barbara Walker

Curated by Chris Clarke and Fiona Kearney.

“Dessiner met une ligne autour d’une idée.” (Drawing is putting a line around an idea.” —Henri Matisse

Drawing is used across a wide range of disciplines as a foundational way of learning, sharing and generating knowledge. It is exploratory and experimental, a means of sketching out plans and articulating ideas, line by line. A Line Around an Idea features work by contemporary artists and architects whose practices demonstrate how drawing can be a creative—and disruptive—force, a way of knowing the world through observation, but also a medium that can redraw the lines to present different histories and narratives. 

Barbara Walker’s works reflect on the overlooked contributions of Black servicemen and women in the British army over the past century. The Big Secret III depicts two Black infantrymen leading a brigade, with their comrades represented by blank silhouettes, while a series of portraits of soldiers are superimposed on recruitment posters. Her poignant tributes materialise a record of military service that often remains invisible in established war narratives. For Rinus van de Velde, self-portraiture is a means of embodying different characters and personas. He regularly plays the role of a tortured artist in these compositions, a stereotype explored in Hey Vince, Take it Easy, a playful take on Van Gogh’s iconic sunflower paintings. Rachel Goodyear’s delicately rendered pencil and watercolour drawings illustrate imagined moments where birds perch atop the heads of hooded twins, cones are mysteriously strapped to faces, and wolves circle a solitary woman. In Īnci Eviner’s works, human and animal figures are loosely conjured in black and red ink. Her gestural, calligraphic, approach imbues the drawings with a sense of fluidity, as objects and clothing become almost indistinguishable from individual bodies.

There is an immediacy in drawing that directly relates to the artist’s touch, delineating ideas through rough drafts and first impressions. Helen Farrell presents a series of hand-drawn transcriptions of manuscripts by the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The works transmit notes and diagrams, crossed-out words and illegible phrases, drawing attention to the tactility of writing and Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the embodied encounter with the world around us. In Dan Perjovschi’s Chalk Reality series, his sketches on blackboards capture the absurdity of contemporary politics, offering irreverently comical commentaries on globalisation, religion, migration, war and the art market, while recalling political cartoons, caricatures and classroom graffiti. Felicity Clear’s Unravelled is a diptych of jumbled lines, angular diagrams, and swirling arcs that relate to her interest in engineering and infrastructure. Their apparent informality reveals an underlying structure of grids and plans, and the intricate patterns that support everyday urban environments. 

The relationship between drawing and architecture is explored in several works. O’Donnell + Twomey’s original plans for the Glucksman, inspired by Seamus Heaney’s poem Lightenings viii, shows how the preparatory sketch serves as a first step in the realisation of architectural projects, while plattenbaustudio present a large-scale, site-specific drawing that responds to C.P. Curran’s photograph of James Joyce in his parent’s back garden. Through historical photographs, maps and field surveys, the artists extrapolate outwards to imagine a wider panorama of Phibsborough in 1904. Julie Merriman’s works are based on existing unoccupied buildings, resembling architectural blueprints of city-centre dwellings. Their compositions become blurred by carbon and typewriter film, as if deteriorating through neglect and decay. In Pablo Bronstein’s Post-Enlightenment Fireworks, meticulously rendered facades of imaginary neo-classical buildings are interrupted by miniature flashes of watercolour explosions. Despite the formal austerity and intricate detail of the settings, the potential for revolution remains just visible on the horizon. 

A Line Around an Idea: Ways of Knowing through Contemporary Drawing Practices is supported by The Arts Council Ireland, University College Cork and private philanthropy through Cork University Foundation. 

The Glucksman is the proud recipient of the European Museum Academy Art Museum Award 2022.