Drawings by Michael Prosee
Red Liquorice On A Hot Day
Boardroom and Little Gallery
11 December 2018 - 10 February 2019
The Opening Night is on 10 December 2018
Imagine, if you will, a piece of red liquorice. Its smooth tactility in your hand giving way to stickiness as the sugary surface is warmed by heat. It disintegrates further over the course of a hot day, dissolving into gelatinous ooze; a misshapen lump of a red mark left haphazardly on a surface.
Michael Prosee's drawing practice reconsiders drawing within contemporary art practice. No longer limited to a notebook, or pencil on paper, drawing has been re- defined more broadly as a mark-making process on a surface. This is reflected in the variety of mixed media, ranging from watercolour, to ink, coloured pencil, pastel, even collage, which are utilised in the creation of these works.
Pigments leak and bleed into each other, dissolving into the porous texture of the paper. Lines leave indelible marks on the surface through the pressure applied in their creation. Areas are worked over twice, three times, even several times. Like red liquorice on a hot day, it is a mark on a surface, with each layer becoming a record of time, experience, thought, emotion incurred during the act of making.
Viewed cumulatively, these drawings present a nebulous narrative of possibilities hinted through objects at once recognisable and yet rendered foreign through the drawing process of shapes, lines and marks.
Image credit: Michael Prosee, Untitled, 2017, mixed media on paper, 200 x 165mm.