Drawing in

Penny McCarthy - On the production of thought “I think of the combination of time, breath and elongated thinking as drawing. Drawing is a thought form, this indeterminate space where you can find something out - a process of spatialising thought, time passing marked out in graphite.” Like many of Penny’s drawings On the production of thought involves the transcription of an image, in this case a ‘found’ image used in a book of essays by W.G.Sebald (A Place in the Country, 2013). The image is of a ruined house that is somehow cast adrift on an island. The house was once an asylum where the writer Robert Walser lived at the end of his life. The drawing is made from a corrupted scan of book pages: you see some pixellation, and traces of Penny's processing reproduced in graphite. The title is a reference to an essay by Hermann von Kleist who both Sebald and Walser wrote about. “I love the way that the original image is othered by the pressure of my interpretation yet still feels very present as a sort of hum through the work even though it isn’t visible.” We are also delighted to be screening Penny’s beautiful short film Cloud falls in love with mortal , made in collaboration with Hugo Glendinning. In 2019 Penny was awarded the Evelyn Williams Drawing Prize at the Trinity Wharf Drawing Exhibition, as part of this award she developed her current solo exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, the film documents her process as she creates the drawings for this show. In the film Penny’s voice leads us through a cloud of graphite dust into her studio and the fluid space of thoughts explored through her drawings. Cloud falls in love with mortal is screening in the An Tobar Performance Space.