Pastel Drawings
From 1979 to the end of the 1980s my practice was focused on drawing in pastel. Often on large sheets of paper 5 or 6 feet in size, the subject matter was derived from the history and politics of the northern British Isles, particularly Ulster and Scotland. A large set of these pastel drawings concerned the history of the Highland Clearances in Scotland. Other works dealt with Northern Ireland such as the sequence based on Tom Paulin’s collection Liberty Tree, originally published in 1983. This sequence of poems formed the basis of an artist’s book, Colliding with the Liberty Tree, commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council in 1985. Other works such as Courbet’s Button dealt with historiographical questions. Much of this work was accompanied by textual descriptions and narratives exhibited alongside them. The gallery below contains selected examples of these drawings from this period. (1-6, The Highland Clearances, 7-10 Colliding with the Liberty Tree, 11-12 Courbet's Button, 13 The Centre and Periphery of Modernity, 14-15 Glasgow works.)
From 1979 to the end of the 1980s my practice was focused on drawing in pastel. Often on large sheets of paper 5 or 6 feet in size, the subject matter was derived from the history and politics of the northern British Isles, particularly Ulster and Scotland. A large set of these pastel drawings concerned the history of the Highland Clearances in Scotland. Other works dealt with Northern Ireland such as the sequence based on Tom Paulin’s collection Liberty Tree, originally published in 1983. This sequence of poems formed the basis of an artist’s book, Colliding with the Liberty Tree, commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council in 1985. Other works such as Courbet’s Button dealt with historiographical questions. Much of this work was accompanied by textual descriptions and narratives exhibited alongside them. The gallery below contains selected examples of these drawings from this period. (1-6, The Highland Clearances, 7-10 Colliding with the Liberty Tree, 11-12 Courbet's Button, 13 The Centre and Periphery of Modernity, 14-15 Glasgow works.)