Too many joint shows rest on a flimsy curatorial premise, yoking
together artists with little sympathy for - or often even acquaintance
with - each other's work and drawing tenuous parallels between them.
Rather than the desire to reveal correspondences (conscious or
otherwise) in like-minded practices, such endeavours are usually driven
by logistical or pecuniary necessity, with galleries match-making
artists in the manner of a dating agency, taking into account only the
most superficial of similarities in the process.
In avoiding these hazards with their current coupling of Tim Knowles
and Catherine Morland, fledgling gallery Rokeby has reached a
curatorial coming-of-age. Considered together, Knowles and Morland's
work conducts an enquiry into the more arcane or mystic aspects of the
drawing process; through different methods, they test the influence of
external physical and metaphysical forces - smoke and wind, chance and
memory - on the graphic mark. Seeking to dissolve the purposeful and
delimitative line of traditional draughtsmanship, they instead explore
its more accidental and impermanent manifestations: the chance scribble
made by a pen strapped to a branch as it bobs in the breeze (Knowles),
the fugitive sepia configurations made by smoke on glass (Morland).
Rokeby's sensitive hang of the artists' works allows affinities and
discordances to emerge between the two organically, shaping a
perceptive study of the instability and unpredictability of an age-old
medium.
In an ongoing series, Tim Knowles attaches pens to the tips of
branches of trees in various settings and allows the chance movement of
the wind to dictate a composition. The resulting 'tree drawings'
resemble spidery tumbleweeds that skitter across the paper, their
scratchy lines and abstract blotting parodying the drawings of Jackson
Pollock. Like Pollock, Knowles is more interested in process than form;
but rather than process servicing the heroic figure of the artist (as
it did with Pollock), Knowles uses it to relinquish authorial control,
to release drawing from its enslavement to the artist's hand. Through
inventive, often playful techniques that recall the Surrealist
experiments of Joan Miro, he introduces arbitrary and aleatory elements
into the work's creation. His intention is to make visible the
trajectories of primordial and modern forces, whether the laws of
physics at work within a car as it races around the Brands Hatch
Circuit, or the path of a full moon's reflection on unstill water.
In Tree Drawing - Scots Pine, Buttermere Shore #1 (2005),
wispy articulations form an indexical trace of the movement made by the
droopy limb of a scots pine in Cumbria as it drifts aimlessly over a
piece of paper. Like most of Knowles's pieces, the final work is
presented as a diptych in which the drawing is placed alongside a
c-type print depicting the elaborate arboreal apparatus that made the
mark. Given its Cumbrian context, the unforced lyricism of Knowles's
approach stands in ironic historical juxtaposition to the plein-air
labours of English landscape painters, who for centuries have strived
to capture the agitation of a swaying tree. Knowles achieves their
long-held ambition by the simple fact of enabling the tree to record
its own unrest.
Knowles's interest in the capriciousness of chance is complemented
by Morland's fascination with the instability of vision and the
vagaries of perception. Manipulating smoke, light and water on glass,
she pictures modern figures reclining in park-like settings, their
sooty silhouettes delineated from bleached-out grass as in a faded
negative. Some of the scenes are overlaid within Perspex boxes and
given a psychedelic tint; in others the sense of nostalgia is conveyed
through the projection of flickering light, leaving after-images on the
wall like half-recalled memories. Fashioned from smoke and shadows,
these fragile and temporal images refer to optical innovations of the
nineteenth century such as the pin-hole camera and Victorian
illusionism.
The oneiric quality of Morland's smoke drawings - their smudged
focus and sketchy lines - is effected through a highly experimental
draughtsmanship. A perverse chiaroscuro in parts evokes a solidity of
form, and elsewhere, dissolves it; likewise, a density of smoke is
sometimes used to suggest perspective but also to collapse it. Like
Knowles, Morland pushes the boundaries of drawing as a process and a
medium, destabilising its authoritative line, exposing its illusory
character and investigating its manifold possibilities. Nina Miall
Nina Miall is a freelance writer and art historian. She ran the Public
Programme at the Royal Academy of Arts in London for several years
before leaving to undertake a Masters in contemporary art at the
Courtauld Institute. She currently contributes criticism to a number of
international art magazines and websites.
Tim Knowles and Catherine Morland
Until 1 August
Rokeby Gallery
37 Store Street
London WC1E 7QF
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7168 9942
Email: rokeby@rokebygallery.com