Nail House Drawings

Referring to real architectural holdouts, where people refuse to make way for the demolition of their homes, these drawings mediate between the photographic records circulating the internet and an ongoing series of paintings. Giving form to the ‘nails that stick out’ is an act of slow archival resistance, a haptic intervention against erasures on digital platforms or city streets.

The line draws the outline of things encountered, each line is individual and specific, a haptic presence left by the hand. The line is in search of the thingness of the thing, where it sits in the realm of representation, symbol or metaphor and where I might find the ambiguities, anonymities or unknowns that might give it potency. In these drawings, whilst being inspired by very real places, i have tried to create a form so paired down that it lies on the cusp of being one thing and then another - a universal something that stands in for something else and lingers in the mind metaphorically - a conjuring line - a character with an absence of fixed boundaries.

As starting points for the paintings these drawings have to be barely there - just an idea of a thing - too much and the possibilities will be killed off. Drawing them over and over to reach a physical form of understanding, the buildings become part of my own embodied memory and free me to paint the things as they are.

The ground for the drawings is a mixed wash of ink and acrylic paint, the materials initially cohere but separate as they dry, activating a contested site on which to draw. There is no blank page - all land is owned and contested - only when the ink dries do we realise we are left powerless and vulnerable.

small sketches