Chalk and charcoal on black paper
From the exhibition Between Forms
I return again and again to the female form in my drawings. Often she appears strong, elongated, and almost statuesque, yet something less certain is happening beneath the surface. She can feel shadowy and blurred, sometimes almost like a trace of herself.
Barely Holding Form came from that space.
There is strength in this figure. She is upright. She has presence. She hasn't collapsed. But neither is she entirely solid. The body seems to be assembling and disassembling at the same time, held together by a series of marks that could just as easily begin to disappear.
For me, that is where the idea of the body under strain enters the work.
Strain doesn't always look like breaking. Sometimes it looks remarkably like functioning. The body continues. You remain upright. From the outside, the form is still there. Yet internally, maintaining that form can require an extraordinary amount of effort.
There is a wistfulness to her that I particularly love. I don't see her as defeated. I see someone holding herself together while perhaps feeling like a shadow or blur of the person she recognises herself to be.
The chalk against the black paper became important for that reason. Rather than drawing a solid body onto a white surface, the figure seems to emerge from darkness. Some lines assert themselves; others disappear back into it. Form is present, but never completely fixed.
That tension runs throughout Between Forms. The figures move through different states — physical, cognitive and emotional — sometimes distorted by strain, sometimes gathering themselves, sometimes releasing, and sometimes beginning to take form again.
Barely Holding Form exists somewhere near the beginning of that movement.
She is still here.
Still upright.
Still holding form.
Barely.
