Situational Attempts: In conversation with Billy Parker

Situational Attempts at The Artist Room, 11th - 27th September 2024.

By ESME BLAIR October 21, 2024

I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.

–Antonin Artaud

Triumphantly eclectic in assessing the parameters of Drawing (capital D) was Billy Parker’s curatorial debut at The Artist Room: Situational Attempts. Assembling a series of drawings unconcerned with describing images true to life, each work engaged with drawing as a means to the ongoing process of thinking. The show took from Antonin Artaud’s 50 Drawings to Murder Magic, the published notebooks he completed across various mental asylums across almost a decade, filled with endless notes and drawings. It’s clear these  scrawlings were his vital means of emotional output. I spoke with Billy about making the curatorial personal and the draw to Drawing.

‘I always return to Artaud. There are a few things I always return to when I’m stuck: Michelangelo’s drawings, Aretha Franklin’s earlier music, Guston’s abstract works, Sarah Kane’s plays, Piero Della Francesca, Lorca’s plays, Billie Holiday, Artaud. They all access truth through pain, a process I think artists are too scared to engage with now…My friend Miele gave me Artaud’s 50 Drawings for my birthday and I remember running to my bedroom and reading it as scripture. He was never a practising fine artist. He didn’t draw because he wanted to.’ Artaud drew as a necessity, a means of necessary expression, imperative really to his survival. Innate in Drawing is its immediacy of access by way of its requirement for a limited array of materials. Out from Artaud’s immediate maddened scribbles was born Situational Attempts, an exhibition which soared into Drawing, traversing as many avenues as there were works in the show.

Joel Wyllie’s drawing Shedding picture No.3 looks like a graphite rubbing- but of something constructed from air like a person’s breath. Just as Artaud said of his 50 Drawings; ‘they are purely and simply the reproduction on the paper of a magical action that I have performed in true space with the breath of my lungs’. There’s an interplay with drawing and erasing, dots and shaded moments hint at describing something with more opacity before we hit the white of the paper again as our eyes breeze about the 28 x 20cm picture.

Joel Wyllie, Shedding Picture No.3 , 2024, Pencil on paper in an oak, calico frame. 28.5 x 20.5 cm

Billy informed me the title of the show came from a series of drawings he had made himself a few months prior. ‘I was lifting symbols and markings from old books then drawing them heavily in 8B pencils, erasing them, then drawing them back then erasing them and so on. You would end with this surface that looked like something trying to situate itself on a piece of paper, constantly failing. Like a ghost lifting a penny up a wall, or flicking the lights on and off, something unreal trying to make itself present in reality.’

Arthur Poujois’ Self Encryption (1) depicts a system of tree branches, mimicked in the sprawling brushstrokes of the cyanotype backdrop. There are a variety of surfaces on display; a slick silk screen which texturally rebounds against its steel frame, a familiar painterly studio mess on the surfaces of the shoebox and likewise atop the soundproofing board. The work’s presence in the show is welcome as a ‘drawing’ outside of the conventional confines of pencil on paper. His Flux drawing “Electric field” has a ludic arrangement, constructed from collage and Japanese ink- the latter having more of a stern connotation with the great tradition of Japanese calligraphy. Here too the ink is used to produce short spurting shapes, resembling letters, sinuous and majestic. Their elegance threatens being derogated by the discarded oblong collage cuttings which instead compliment the dancing ink, together achieving a harmonious synthesis.

Archie Fooks-Smith’s Untitled equally pushes the limits of Drawing. We are presented with the underbelly of what resembles a green heptagonal mortarboard. There are two stamp-like square drawings, the size of a trimmed thumbnail, resembling a pre-opened desktop photograph, placed around this green lake which frames a hand sewn lining, constructed from several small pieces of fabric. The focal point of this work is on the margins rather than in the centre. Likewise, the perspective we see from is affected by the warm green fuzz of the ‘frame’ which strongly resembles meadows viewed from above- we the viewer become the globetrotter.

Katie Shannon’s works are captivating by their felty descriptions of their subjects and the total coverage of the picture plane with graphite. Like a screen image warped by white noise, Guinness with Sicko depicts near indecipherable pub noise through transparent surfaces, occupied counters and diaphanous silhouettes.

Archie Fooks-Smith, Untitled, 2024, Pencil on paper, hand sewn fabric, craft-board, primed thread. 31 x 31 x 11 cm

Richard Maguire’s Not of a man is a succinct portrait depicted on a sacred scrap of paper we’ve been lucky to catch before it floated off into some destination for refuse. The work was left frameless, so as to re-emphasise the work’s transience and size. It was therefore donned a further precarity. The texture beneath the drawing is made up of what looks like now dry paint droplets, splayed in all directions like rays of divine light.

Oluwatobiloba Ajayi’s Surviving abstraction through abstraction (to borrow from Torkwase Dyson), resembles recollected dream sequences. Constructed from black oil on paper and tape residue, the result is a blotted vision, reflective of that kind of Rorschach exposure of the inner mind. Displayed as a sequence of three, the images read as film. There’s a sentimentality innate in the barely legible faces belonging to figures who are strangers to us.

In jesting cartoon strip stylings, Hugo Hagger’s three drawings provoke by the mere description of a policeman’s hat which is placed on top of a stickman in Bully! and Bully !!. Despite being a bare bones pair of drawings replete with graphite scrawls and plenty of unfilled white space, the presence of fear, ridicule, embarrassment and anger is quite palpable. The force of the application on the pencil is evident. The additive scribble erases the implied offender in each image, in turn cultivating a stress around them, juxtaposed by the police figures’ vapid cartoon smiles.

Roses in charcoal with stems that read like barbed wire make up Mia Vallance’s work in the show. The flowers are floating in space as if they’re in flight having been chucked; discarded to spite a lover? Applauding mid standing ovation? The swirling gestural dabs of charcoal throughout portray the image as an overall lovestruck maelstrom. We’ve all been there…

‘All roads lead back to Artaud,’ Billy tells me. ‘I remember standing in front of the shooting wall in Auschwitz and the only thing I could see were Artaud’s pages– they had the same silent sound.’ The profundities of visiting post-war Auschwitz as a Jewish person providing insurmountable and unending means to react. I asked Billy what it was, if anything, he set out to achieve in this show, to which he said ‘to not fear personal emotionality and vulnerability as this is when I think the best work is made, even if it requires enduring pain.’ Where Drawing was once a means of capturing a likeness, these works stray from the attempt to capture too much figuration, instead opting for drawing as the most suitable means to capture what it is they are cogitating and feeling. The vast net Drawing throws accommodates those flitting roaming thoughts which we fear will never land on something. Far from a terra firma, this show sees the drawer as synonymous with the wanderer, the ponderer, the feeler. There is a resolve in the acceptance that the landing may not happen, that the wander is sometimes the thing itself. WM