Black Space Drawings

Graphite stick on paper, 150cm x 100cm. Set of four.

This series of drawings was made in the studio at the Irish Museum of Modern Art as part of the Artists Work Programme between June and October 2002.

The drawings were first shown in the Museum's Process Room as works in progress.

The set were later shown at PM Gallery, London, to accompany the exhibition of Motion Path, Spetember 2006.

The Black Space Drawings were shown with two of the 13 Cameras drawings.

"The drawings in coloured pencil on paper and graphite on paper are copies of views from the 3D modelling application the artists used to make an earlier multi-screen video installation (Prisma, 2003).
They are made through a painstaking process of scaling and copying the wire frame diagrams that describe the points of view of a number of virtual cameras that all occupy exactly the same point in space to produce a fly-through animation sequence.
The drawings are of a subject that is neither a material thing nor an actual space, and in fact could never occur in the physical world. Instead the drawings are of something that is already an image, and an image that only serves as a tool or handle with which to act - elsewhere, and on something entirely intangible. At the same time the two sets of drawings are mirror images of each other. The wire frame objects in the large black drawing are what the virtual camera would see as objects approach from deep space and pass through the lens; the blue and pink drawings are what the objects would see as they approached the cameras.
Initially the drawings were part of a process of trying to understand how the software represents these points of view in space to the user of the programme and were used to start thinking about how an analogue version of a virtual fly-through might be constructed. Given the amount of labour that went in to rendering these spaces as drawings they gradually became something quite different from a simple descriptive or diagrammatic attempt to understand something and made apparent the elaborate tensions between the high-tech. of the 3D computer simulation and the low tech. of the graphite mark – the intangibility of the subject; the materiality of the drawings and the physicality of their making".

Gallery text

Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone, 2006.

 

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