22 Aug In Conversation with Meryl Donoghue: ‘Drawing’
Today our conversation series with Meryl Donoghue continues as we discuss drawing.
StolenSpace: It is clear that you have the ability to create artwork in many different ways— Even when it comes to a single medium! As I can see in your portfolio, your drawings can have a coarse, primal beauty and simplicity– or they can be extremely intricate, delicate and photorealist. Both are absolutely amazing to look at. Which style do you prefer working in most? Do you find there are benefits of working with such versatility?
Meryl Donoghue: There is a great benefit to breaking with your ‘normal’ approach to things. My propensity is for precision, structure, order and detail and this is where I am comfortable. The more ‘primal’ drawings you refer to in my online portfolio are in my opinion just that and were made in a very different way to my usual approach. I would equate them in some sense to the automatic drawing of the surrealists. They were made with no plan or preparation or idea as to what they might be. They were made whilst listening to audio from collected video footage of my childhood, which I digitalised and put on my ipod. This acted as a tuneless soundtrack of my young life and provoked certain memories and thoughts that I never knew I had lost. They are also mono-prints and so the final image is only revealed once the drawing is finished and the paper removed from the inked plate. The image is always a surprise as it is a reverse of what you have drawn and the nature of the medium means that many unintended marks are made. There is a certain freedom to this way of making and that is what attracts me to it. Both approaches are interesting to me and I would always want to try something different. I would not want to be stagnant in my making-I believe I have fallen into that trap before.
‘I thought to have been gone by now…’ opens 5th September at StolenSpace Gallery, 17 Osborn Street, E1 6TD.