Drawn Away Together

'Drawn Away Together' was developed through discussions with 11 contemporary Scottish, or Scottish-based, artists to balance the historical legacy of Abstract Art with direct practical and intellectual reflections on making painting, sculpture and site-specific drawings. The result is an exhibition that celebrates the fertility of perception – drawing us away through forms, colours, memories and associations.

The artist Carl Andre recently stated that, “we live in a linguistic culture and everything has to be turned into language [and] people don't understand anything until you've explained it." 'Drawn Away Together,' which was led intuitively by the selected artists’ work, is implicitly resistant to this tendency. This does not negate critical rigour, but works against the assumption that artworks produced primarily through an engagement with materials and abstract forms are not intellectually valuable in themselves.

There are reasons to think that this is an ideal time for the role of ‘abstract art’ to be re-examined. It is argued that we live at a time when divisions between intellectual labour and manual labour continue to increase, with greater sections of the population having disembodied jobs based at computers. As Ken Robinson has also famously commentated, education mirrors and reproduces this disembodiment: when you progress through school to higher education the body is phased out and emphasis is placed on just a portion of the brain to the exclusion of other types of understanding. It is also argued that people are increasingly distracted, losing their sense of self-determination and losing interest in things that are difficult to achieve; “Never have so many wanted so much so badly ... Never has the ID been so flattered and indulged”, claims philosopher Michael Foley in his work exploring traits of modern living. ‘Abstract art’, as represented in this exhibition, is about an embodied understanding and the tacit sensibility that informs sensory and intelligent responses to environments, forms and colours. The art derives from concentrated activity and invites focused engagement, independent decision making, and in some cases derives from years of careful learning about materials and their effects. It therefore seems reasonable to think that the practice of ‘abstract art’ could have broader connections to everyday life than perhaps it has ever had. Where modernist Abstract Art was vigorously criticised for being elitist, distanced from popular culture and social issues, perhaps ‘abstract art’ can now, in quite an earnest way, assume a different position: representing the overlooked aspects of individual perception and creative intelligence that in fact everyone possesses.

The artists in this exhibition were selected from a long-list of artists connected to Scotland. Where one artist is an undergraduate and some are recent graduates, others have been exhibiting for over 30 years. Drawn Away Together is therefore also a forum for cross-generational exchange and an opportunity to think about the evolution of these forms of art.

A catalogue accompanies this exhibition and includes an essay by James Clegg, lecturer, writer and curator. The catalogue also includes statements by each artist.

Rachel Barron (Based in Glasgow, born 1989)

Artist, printmaker and graphic designer, Rachel has previously made work to translate dance movements and the scale of the universe into abstract, graphic forms. Apparatus for geometric composition is a bespoke mechanism for guiding lines and printing blocks and is Rachel’s second device to facilitate the production of new work.

Miranda Blennerhassett (Based in Dublin, born 1972)

Miranda’s site-specific paintings have included distilled figurative motifs and geometric patterns that can be intricate and present optical illusions. The architectural features of the Gallery were not altered for W.53rd St, allowing its almost otherworldly platonic quality to emphasise the material reality of the space.

Kevin Henderson (Based near Dundee, born 1963)

Working across performance art, painting and poetry, Kevin draws upon interconnected memories of seeing and reading, often linked with historical examples of abstract art. As with his poetry, his paintings attempt to capture these complex sensations and relationships within the economy of a small number of signs.

Paul Keir (Based in Edinburgh, born 1960)

Interested in how the work modifies the space it exists in, and in our visual apprehensions of the place and things around us, Paul makes work which is centred on tensions between improvisatory and formal elements. His practice uses a variety of formal strategies and is often characterised by a spareness of means.

Malcolm O'Connell (Based in Dundee, born 1988)

Malcolm’s ideas are evoked through standardised geometric elements, which invite reflection on the meanings materials can carry. Previous works have included words alluding to places the artist visited and therefore, despite the newness of materials, carry memories. Art historical developments and elements of industrial process are also referenced.

Andrew Mackenzie (Based in Stow, born 1969)

Andrew’s work elegantly moves across the categories of abstraction and figuration, the natural and man-made, to create images carefully poised between different pictorial forces. The work in this exhibition is his most ambitious work to date, reflecting characteristic draftsmanship and vision. (Represented by Sarah Myerscough Fine Art)

Lorna Macintyre (Based in Glasgow, born 1977)

As poetry utilisers the symbolic resonance of isolated words and phrases, Lorna utilises chance within her work to create pieces which are evocative rather than literal interpretations of places and histories. In her earlier work featured here, Say All the Poets (2006), she provides a more direct translation of a work of poetry by Alberto Cairo (aka Fernando Pessoa).

Jo Milne (Based in Edinburgh and Barcelona, born 1966)

Interested in things that are invisible, Jo’s work offers a way to engage with abstract theories through tactile, hand-made works. In this case maps are cut out as interpretations of string theory: the spatiality of the maps being opened out to the possibility of a multiverse. Ideas that are otherwise held at a distance are brought within a personal and visual enquiry.

Neil Nodzak (Based in Edinburgh, born 1987)

Modernist design practices had a political sense of urgency about them – if people’s environments could be rationalised, it was reasoned, it could benefit society at large. Neil’s work taps in to this legacy to the extent to which it opens sculpture out to become part of the fabric or our environment, becoming, for Drawn Away Together, the entrance to the exhibition.

Eric Schumacher (Based in Edinburgh, born 1985)

Eric takes elements from the fabric of contemporary society, commercial materials and tawdry interiors, and carefully works them into resolved sculptural forms. There’s a sense that this process provides some form of catharsis, a repossessing of the mass-produced nature of much of the lived environment.

Alan Shipway (Based in Edinburgh, born 1956)

The works in Drawn Away Together demonstrate the concise, laconic and often hard-won way Alan works, pursuing the minimum number of elements required for a painting to succeed. This success is intuitive and beyond the reach of words - yet it can demonstrate to us anew the lucidity and clarity of the art of painting.