Amanda Welch: Conditions

~ LINES MADE BY WALKING ~ A Drawing and Walking Workshop, June 2018 ~

Bressay Lighthouse, Shetland | 5th May - 24th June | Wed, Fri - Sunday | 11am - 5pm

Images from Opening Event: ‘Drawing Log’ 2009 (detail) | ‘Lochs of Shetland’ 2013 (detail) | ‘Learning Shetland’ 2014 (image of its shadow)

Saturday 5th May was the opening event for London based artist Amanda Welch’s exhibition here on Bressay. This month she’s in residence at Bressay Lighthouse, making work in the studio there whilst also manning her show ‘Conditions’.

There are recent pieces here as well as some from a few years ago. It’s very interesting to see a journey in thought and it’s translation into making. The first image here is a piece from a body of work that Amanda undertook from around 2005. During her ‘incidental’ bicycle trips across the Hackney Downs, she started to notice things - things that changed, or happenings, or seemingly insignificant details. You could call these fragments of life hidden in the peripherals.

To record these details, she began making drawings after her cycles, seeing what had planted itself in the memory. Each drawing was seen as significant and kept without judgement, and was not elaborated on afterwards, preserving the ‘innocence’ of drawing - the impulse of emptying the mind was not at first manipulated in any compulsion to make ‘finished works’.

Diverging from her life-long love of painting on canvas, Amanda talks of then wishing to find new ways of working with time and works’ ‘separateness’. Memory drawings on pieces of to-hand paper and card took on ‘object qualities’ rather than being just pictorial representations. Work soon evolved into 3-dimensions, pieces to be walked around, to change and evolve, to collect residue of time passing. They were made from almost anything available - found wood scrap, ladders, trellis, newspaper etc. - further ‘residue’ from the edges of life.

Amanda talks of wishing to ‘sign off’ or ‘consume’ the huge collection of Hackney Downs drawings that amassed. Some were literally repurposed into paper mache 3d works. ‘Drawing Log’ is a drawn map of the downs, with the dates of each drawing logged and plotted, and is also a way of collecting and drawing a line under the body of work. Unreadable to anyone but the artist, this ‘literal’ use of factual information in a drawing however itself produces ‘something other’ - further paths to explore.

In Amanda’s Shetland work, maps continue everywhere. Maps, usually sources of factual information, become ‘transformative’. In ‘Lochs of Shetland’, the familiar shape of Shetland is fragmented, yet also fragilely suggested, by only tracing the lochs. There is such a strong sense here of how saturated the land is - and how precarious the whole archipelago is. Amanda talks of difficulties of when to stop - do you put every puddle and burn in? Each traced loch flooded with ink bleeds out into the surrounding white of the paper, a suggestion of infinite detail, and the unstable nature of what we call ‘containers’.

Lines too are fragile containers of our impressions in drawings we make. People are barely contained by our view of them - there’s always something other.

I love drawing, but constantly find myself fenced in by thinking ahead, the drawing becomes contained in its own intended finished state before it’s even begun.

For ‘Lines Made By Walking’, I hope to take participants and myself on a journey where we simply collect experiences, being visually curious for its own sake. Reading about and looking at the explorations of Amanda Welch, it seems that she has in many ways discerned how difficult is to move past composition and premature thoughts of a finished work when making.

In nature, everything is in changing states of becoming. The final image here is a quick photo I took of the shadow cast from Amanda’s ‘Learning Shetland’, a very large paper mache and reclaimed-material sculpture of the whole of the map of Shetland. Amanda describes how she used the map as a template to make a 3D work - a kind of reverse process. The 3D sculpture is in the 3D world of time (changes of light and time affect it) - but the shadow it casts could even then be traced, making another 2d ‘map’. Everything feeds back into another translation, another transformation. The ‘fixed’ nature of 2d drawings allows us to order and compose our world within a neat rectangle, to aspire to knowing. It also however allows us to record our most fleeting of impressions.

In ‘Lines..’ we’ll be walking the area around the lighthouse on Bressay and tracing lines in the landscape through drawing as we go. These ‘lines’ could be seen as borders, edges, or containers but (like the water-edges in Amanda’s ‘Lochs…’) they are ultimately in flux. Through drawing and walking with others in ‘Lines…’ I hope to sense this constant movement, yet also create pools of stillness in the contemplative process of drawing.

Sources:

‘Being in the Studio with Hackney Downs’, A.Welch. 2012. The Many Press, London.

‘Conditions’, A.Welch. 2018. The Many Press, London.

Aimee LabourneMay 5, 2018