Phil Sawdon
Phil Sawdon, I am veiled, 2020, Ink on paper. Image courtesy of the artist.
Phil Sawdon, Evaporation, 2020, Pen and ink on paper. Image courtesy of the artist.
The Fictional Museum of Drawing still subterranean in a poor stiff soil… retreats … accommodates sites of affected apathy … bare linear works petrified in the minute cavities of the gallery walls; bones shielded from conservation whilst feigning indifference despite impermanence.
Carcass and cadaver drawn … small brown birds continually pick at the bindings … clusters and contradicts … seeking solace in numbers … aggregates in our neighbourhood.
The Museums’ drawn works occupy microscopic vicinities …interstices … simulating death, eluding the after-life as non-life so as to endure at a midpoint. They are veiled.
‘Can we save them all?’
Fruitless fictions exposed in an amalgam of support and media … carefully placed in-between …the middle ground? … furthest from fixed points of view … virtually … a non-site of groundless ground … disinterested, inert and helpless in a culture of use, practice and consumption.
The condition[s] for work [in The Museum] to endure and be [in]visible in this anaemic and indeterminate state relies in part on erratic degrees of exposure. It may be that they show a very feint line and that no line is discernible … they are getting thinner but so incrementally as scarcely to impress upon themselves or any accompanying works in a series. The surfaces sweat and are frequently attended by obscuration of vision and temporary Derridian blindness … choosing partial consciousness, simultaneously wandering the galleries, delightfully imperfect, passing into a state of coma from which they barely rally. The smell on entering the galleries is honied. The works are uncatalogued and the arranging and labelling of the contents of The Museum is incomplete. The task is subject to deliberate delay.
The Keeper and the Conservation Department are bidden to negate any guide[lines] for the accurate and consistent description of material and technique … incapable words … unspecific syntax … rough copy … hyd(g)roscopic, vellum, fragile, paper, parchment, crinkle, flake, cockled, acidic, brown, brittle, water, colour, pen, brush, ink, fade, iron-gall, bistre, sepia, corrode, metal-point, tarnish, lead, white, carbon, Indian, chalk, graphite, fugitive … ‘allthesethings’ drawn on and on anonymous.
An announcement in the vestibule asserts … ‘This is not a drawing’ … Relieved, the works pause for breath … a tiny transitional interval disregarded in The Archive … eyes pass over the collections (VR and otherwise) peering for evidence of marks. The smears, smudges, stains, scrapes, scuffs, and scratches from an alliterative hand remind that the drawings ought to remain untouched … clumsy and cotton gloved?
‘Leave the bones alone …’
Overheard … muttered around one of the countless corridors somewhere between mind and hand … theories means of egress.
A frame is opening for concepts to move beyond the removal of any backing. The value is meaningless … a perforated line. Mounted on board fashioned from wood pulp leaving a russet mark along a cut … lacerations … brown and brittle. Do we care to recognise the history? The medium rubs against glass … buffering the complexity …corroding the support.
Several legends read …’This is an imitation’ … ‘Give Room’ … countless marks flow in the aether … stymied [by choice] from encountering a surface … twisting this way and that toward gallery walls and averting eyes … refusing any corporeal stability.
The Archive is in darkness. All light is detrimental, cumulative and perhaps irrevocable. If a drawing stumbles and falls it is covered with a curtain. The small brown birds savour the various insects locked in the swathes of protective wrapping. The insects are encouraged by humidity whilst bacterial foxing disguises surfaces … micro-climates … dead skin and becoming powders. Coveting fragility … predisposed to fading, the works clamour and are exhibited intermittently … imperilled by Evaporation and Condensation.
Phil Sawdon, Condensation, 2020, Pen and ink on paper. Image courtesy of the artist.
All are seemingly fated to be preserved by the maintenance surgeon[s] returning the aged and damaged to an original condition never knowingly requested nor desired. Left untouched to cure for years or more then gradually removed with an eraser and a piece of leather scrapping away the pulverized marble surface with a blade … no intended image … simply contemporary contrasts and travelling concepts.
Interjection. oh well. (idiomatic) …
Phil Sawdon is an artist, writer, editor, erstwhile academic, founder and keeper of The Fictional Museum of Drawing. Phil was a Senior Lecturer at Loughborough University until 2011. He is currently an Honorary Fellow in the School of Creative Arts. He is a co-editor of the academic book series Drawing In (Bloomsbury). He publishes in various formats including fictions, academic/scholarly books, and artworks including sound-works and moving image. His book titles include Drawing – The Purpose (Intellect, 2008), Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art (I.B. Tauris, 2007), Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art (I.B. Tauris with Russell Marshall, 2012), Drawing Ambiguity: Beside the Lines of Contemporary Art (I.B. Tauris with Russell Marshall, 2015) and Drawing Difference: Connections Between Gender and Drawing (I.B. Tauris with Marsha Meskimmon, 2015). His drawing fictions have appeared in Drain, Nyx, Fukt magazine of contemporary drawing, Versal, Danse Macabre, Stimulus Respond, Gone Lawn, and soanyway. He works with Deborah Harty as the creative drawing research collaboration humhyphenhum and with Russell Marshall as the creative drawing research collaboration Marshall & Sawdon.