ART n ab ART - Thinking Through Drawing Exhibition

This exhibition has a broad and eclectic range of artists. They are all using drawing as a means to explore ideas, ways of thinking about what they are doing - through technique imagination or concept. Four exhibitions into this year's programme, and this is the first one to both excite and challenge.

There is the usual mix of bold, the boring, as well as baffling work on show here. Stretching your ideas of what drawing can be and do. Proving you can sketch using a wider variety of media, it doesn't have to be just pencils, pens or charcoal. Though there are example of those here too. The rapidly executed sketch and the slowly evolving and more considered drawing. But there is also room for drawing that has immense thoughtfulness and insight within it. 

The stand out work, for me, was Sam Hodge's beautifully evocative drawings of broken tablet and smart phone screens. The cracks in the screens are carefully transfered and etched into plasticated sheets, that are then inked and printed. There was also an accompanying book, which has text on the opposite page explaining how the screens got broken in the first place. With brilliant titles such as - It works, which is the main thing - Nick thinks there is a delicious irony in the Universe -  A lot of things have happened. The overall title for this work A Catalogue of Misfortune, could be a statement about the human condition. The associations and humanity of these drawings provoking further thought.

Other drawings worthy of note are Phillip Walmsley's 3D sculptural like drawings of imaginary spaces and Marion Piper's sequences of tonal forms and shapes.

CARROT REVIEW  - 6/8