PRESS RELEASE 
​Drawing de-Centered: The Courthouse, Ennistymon.
Preview: 18th September
Virtual Opening: 26th September
Run Dates: 19th September - 7th November

Drawing de-Centered (DdC) is a diverse, nomadic and emerging artistic   platform that explores contemporary drawing practice. DdC aims to provoke and probe drawings intrinsic and expanding qualities. Characterised by openness, embodiment, and liminality, Drawing deCentered focus on critical thinking around drawing practice and questions what drawing is but also what can drawing be.  In this exhibition of the same name Drawing deCentered, a multiplicity of practices and research interests together with a wide-range of materialities that include but not limited to, the humble pencil on paper to neon lights to natural drawing materials emphasise DdC’s strength. 

Racheal Agnew and Kiera O’Toole’s practice share a central concern of  drawing and phenomenology in relation to site. Agnew explores transitional spaces while O’Toole examines the atmospheric, material, temporal and corporeal  aspects of human experience. Mary-Ruth Walsh offers an exploration into the gap that exist between 2D and 3D spaces particularly architectural spaces. Felicity Clear also considers the transition from 2D to 3D through traditional and non-traditional media. Kevin Killen’s practice captures individual’s journeys and movements through light while Melissa O’Faherty’s interest lies the intersection of humanities impact on nature.

Drawing de-Centred has recently shown with international Dutch artists in ‘Beyond Drawing’ curated by Arno Kramer and reviewed by Clare E. Scott in Visual Arts Ireland News Sheet. July 2020.  https://www.drawingdecentered.com/beyond-drawing.html

Drawing de-Centred is exhibiting in The Courthouse, Ennistymon, Co Clare with the following artists: Rachael Agnew / Mary-Ruth Walsh / Kiera O’Toole / Kevin Killen / Melissa O’Faherty / Felicity Clear


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Rachael Agnew Agnew's practice centres around the phenomenology of interstitial spaces. This is defined here as the subjective experience of empty, between, intermediate and transitional spaces. Her work takes the form of site-specific drawing installations and interventions. Movement, light and transparency are key elements in creating and perceiving her works.
Mary-Ruth Walsh My practice explores public spaces from frenetic airports and shopping centres to the desolate loneliness of empty spaces. In public and domestic spaces it’s fascinating to see how architecture affects the way we move and behave. I’m curious about the gap between the two dimensional drawing or blueprint of a building and the three dimensional materiality of the realisation of that building.  What happens in that gap between the object and its two-dimensional representation is full of promises and denials, of realities and unrealities.  The drawings and blueprints are a deliberate exercise of improbability and possibility.  But the subtext is also about the substitution of real experience or real time.
Kiera O’Toole Why (the Site of) Drawing Matters...to me. My practice examines how humans experience the world and how the things in our world affect us as they resound in our bodies, always and already. I'm deeply concerned about the atmospheric, material, temporal and corporeal aspects of the experience which forms and informs my drawing practice.  
The embodied mark and all its complexities: diversity, directness, universality and presentness is evidence of human existence. It's a way to experience the world and to pay attention to the everyday. My hope is to create a 'Holding Space' for a shared experience between the viewer, the drawing and the site  - which maybe an art space or a non-art space or a rural or urban environment By paying attention to our intuitive and felt sense of experience, we can become aware of the intersubjective here and now.
Kevin Killen My practice involves capturing life through studying people’s
physical space and the journeys or movements they make. Very often
I physically walk a route myself, filming long-exposures that ‘draw’
the journey in light.  I use more traditional drawing tools to translate
the journey lines using the medium of neon light that captures moments in space and time.
Melissa O’Faherty Of particular interest to  O’Faherty’s drawing practice is the phenomenon in nature and reflections of humanity's influence and attempts to control our natural environment. ‘I'm interested in how combining photography and drawing and might direct the viewer to an exposure of the subject matter. My work is also concerned with drawing images revealing themselves through the making process of the automatism technique, the art-making process where the subconscious is allowed to create’. 

Felicity Clear My practice involves the intersection of line, light and perception. Drawing in a variety of mediums and in various scales is at the core. From small two-dimensional works on paper to large sculptural installations and hand drawn animation. The provisional nature of drawing and its other technical role in engineering, architecture and everyday life are central reference points. Often perspective is skewed and three-dimensional elements cast shadows which present visual conundrums. 
As Francis Halsall says in ‘Drawing the line’ in Irish Arts Review autumn 2019: ‘Given the priority that Clear gives to line, the work is often suggestive of the aesthetic forms of infrastructure, alluding as they do to maps, plans, scaffoldings and support structures. Through these allusions to infrastructure, her meticulous and intricate constructions become highly effective metaphors for the systems that are ubiquitous in everyday life’.

Drawing (Journal)Research, Theory, Practice
ISSN 20570384 , ONLINE ISSN 20570392 Focusing on drawing as a significant discipline in its own right, Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice is a peer-reviewed journal that facilitates ongoing international debates within the wider fields of its practice and research. A vibrant, proactive forum for contemporary ideas, the journal is a platform for interdisciplinary and cross-cultural dissemination of all forms of drawing practice and theory.



Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice promotes and disseminates drawing research with a focus on contemporary practice and its theoretical context. This journal seeks to reestablish the materiality of drawing as a medium at a time when virtual, on-line, and electronic media dominates visuality and communication. The journal represents drawing as a significant discipline in its own right and in a diversity of forms: as an experimental practice, as research, as representation and/or documentation, as historical and/or theoretical exploration, as process or as performance. It explores the drawing discipline across fine art, science and engineering, media and communication, psychology, architecture, design, science and technology, textiles, fashion, social and cultural practices.
As a rigorously peer-reviewed publication the journal presents contributions that deal both with traditional concepts, histories and dominant conventions and those that challenge current thinking and move towards experimental methods, concepts and practices. The topics include papers as well as visual contributions and projects that present drawing as a complex process, serving to:

• become a source and basis for drawing research and exchange of knowledge in a variety of contexts
• be a forum for engaging multidisciplinary debates on the ways in which drawing functions in contemporary culture
• share scholarship in teaching drawing in art and design education and in contemporary art practice
• facilitate different perspectives and debates on drawing as a practice as is changed and modernised by technology
• present drawing as performance, as a tool, as a place of production, as a discursive exploration, a site of conception and as cognitive process

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FOR MORE INFORMATION: https://www.intellectbooks.com/drawing-research-theory-practice

You can share your drawings with us by tagging @CCADLD on Instagram and Twitter and using the hashtags #nationaldrawingday #slowlooking #findingwonder. We’d love to see.

From the artist:

“In these unusual times, the universal activity of drawing can allow us to take the time to slow down and notice the wonder in your everyday environment.  ‘Slow Looking’ is based on the idea that when we spend time observing our environment, we can become present in the moment.
Drawing is a way of being present.
This project is not about technical drawing skills but it is about making your mark in and on the world. So, I am inviting you to draw with me!
On 16 May 2020, when you are walking around outside or sitting in your garden, I invite you to notice what is around you.  What can you observe? What makes you stop and wonder? Is it a crack in the walls, the shadows of plants or the sound of birds as they fly overhead?
Using a piece of chalk, make your mark. Will you fill in the cracks? Trace the shadows or draw the sounds you hear? Find different ways you can draw on the world around you. Find your wonder and tell us how drawing has changed your experience of your environment?”

Click here to learn more about the full list of participants and activities happening across Ireland for National Drawing Day 2020.


 #nationaldrawingday #slowlooking #findingwonder.
@CCADLD

Playlist:
Kiera O'Toole Introduction • 2:45
Drawing from the Non-Place (2017) – Kiera O'Toole • 2:35
Eggs Again – Brian Crotty • 8:51
Crash Bang Wallop – Brian Crotty • 12:20

https://www.solasnua.org/cyber-craic-a-digital-irish-arts-festival-2020/#Visual-Arts
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