Painting & Printmaking School of Fine Art
Rebecca Laverty
I work in expanded drawing to map out a psychological landscape, depicting life through the perspective of someone who lives inside their head.
I enjoy finding whimsy in my misunderstanding of life; I choose to counteract the increasing bleakness of late stage capitalism with notions of absurdity and idealism. In my drawings, distress is a bug in my brain that I can have excavated by my doctor and my circling, excessive thinking instead develops in a nice, straight line. Reality is harsh: I excoriate its surface, uncovering my anatomical make-up or the tiny bacteria living on my skin as though I’m lifting a rock to peer at creatures underneath.
These drawings are my thoughts; I make futile attempts at ‘solving’ them, drawing lines between and around them as though they could ever have a boundary. In agreement with the physicality of my material, I allow the chalky stains of soft pastels or the viscosity of paint to have a hand in forming my nebulous thoughts on the surface— the place where, frustratingly, they are as tangible as they will ever be.
Hell is a place on Earth. Heaven is a place in your head.
– David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
Eulogy for a Drawing
A drawing of a head is gradually erased and drawn over. I document its evolution and print it as a sequence, evidencing a cycle of some sort: birth to death, one thought to another, asleep to awake—or the other way round, depending on the order in which it is viewed.
This series documents the process of a soft pastel drawing. Each stage of the drawing was documented, photocopied, and printed onto canvas with image transfer medium.
