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My work is about journeys through imagined spaces.
The mediums of ink and paint allow me to create an alternative
world of new landscapes and characters. At times, the images are
close to pure abstraction, with no apparent element of figuration.
This imaginary world poses questions of time and
place. In creating new landscapes and sometimes clothing the characters
in period dress, I like to leave the scenes open to individual
interpretation.
Anne Adamson's landscape drawings are manifestations
of memory and fantasy: a primitive shelter, a distant city,
a ruined tower. We also see what has occurred spontaneously
on the page: shimmering watery doodles; furrowed earth as handwriting;
maelstroms of graphite.
The personality of the pencil mark changes
from moment to moment. There are delicate trees which pay homage
to Old Master sketches. There are lackadaisical little heaps
and hillocks. And the dark, snarling lines of a castle look
as if they were made with a pencil held in a fist. In these
drawings, Adamson demonstrates the extraordinary capacity drawn
marks have to translate rapidly from one function or character
to another. [...]
A sense of unfamiliarity pervades Adamson's
art. A road sign has its back to us and there are no paths or
roads. Knowledge here is active , provisional and disjunctured.
These drawings are beautiful and yet disquieting.
Angela Kingston, curator and writer
I chose this ink drawing by Anne Adamson because it is very
open to personal interpretation by each viewer. It is clearly
a landscape which appears to be quite desolate, however there
are signs of human habitation and activity: the ladder propped
up against what might be a type of dwelling, the broken telegraph
poles, and the three wind turbines. The drawing is untitled
and therefore it remains very much up to each person to look
closely and think about what might have happened or might happen
in such a place. For me, art is always about taking a close
look and I feel that this drawing prompts that type of response.
Lara Wardle
Director, the Jerwood Foundation.
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