"Looking Down on the Self," Ginny Grayson
The Veils of PerceptionLink Ginny Grayson's Website
Although I have worked with a variety of methods and mediums, from works on paper to video/performance, it is the activity of drawing itself that is the most compelling for me and is the central basis from which my practice unfolds.
Drawing has long been thought of as the process most suited to giving form to ideas and expressing the internal workings of the imagination and the body, due to its immediacy of touch. This tactile seismographic directness is what attracts me to it as a primary source of communication.
At its essence my work endeavours to relate to the viewer from a personal level the ‘actuality’ of experience itself. It is ‘how’ the work is imaged and made that is most significant to its reading. Perceptual/observational drawing is especially engaging for me – encompassing memory, time, emotion and a high level of concentration. it absorbs, frustrates, excites, terrifies, exhausts and humbles. I often feel blind when drawing from 'life', the more I look the more I see. The more beyond comprehension it all seems to become. At this point I relate to Lucien Freuds remark that -"The harder you concentrate the more things that are really in your head start coming out". A level of completion in a drawing is difficult for me to attain, there always seems to be more that can be explored, learnt and discovered. But it is a conundrum I am becoming more comfortable with as the physicality and tension that manifests in the work through this response, through the process of drawing, re-drawing layering and erasure, is essential to what I am seeking to communicate in it’s direct link to the visceral and the ambiguous effect temporal transience has on our state of being.
Ginny Grayson 2008
