Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past
“For a long time I look at a drawing I have made or am making. What is it? A drawing, for me, should be free of artifice, straightforwardly self-revealing. It should also be, somehow, unknowable. I make systems of opposing lines, the horizontal cancelling the vertical and vice versa. A simple dichotomy. There’s no obvious skill involved. And no metaphors, no deliberate associations. Though inevitably different, every line wants to be the same. Variation seems like a corruption of their nature. Sometimes they are lightly corrupted.
Titles attached to a drawing or group of drawings are useful addendums, but they have little to do with what a drawing actually means. Being straightforward, I’d say my drawings mean nothing, but I spend my time making them, all the same. Maybe they’re about time, how it’s spent, evidenced or contained. While abstract, they’re not immune from connotations, suggesting graphic codes, perhaps, or aspects of design. It’s difficult to make things that don’t leak into other forms and ideas. I think of the gaze orientated, but not captured. Looking at the drawn surface, its compression of criss-crossing lines, your eye escapes the net and passes through. My ideal is a kind of transparency; the absurd idea of being seen to be invisible.
As incremental progress or ruin, discrete stages add tension to the printmaking process. Reproduced as a quasi-mechanical gesture, the printed mark is free to find its own place in the world. The matrix, at the same time, reverses this momentum by drawing the printed image back to its material source. Making prints and drawings, my aim is less to find something new than to manifest something already there. Held in place by opposing energies, they already exist, it seems to me, but to meet them I have to make them” – John Graham
BIOS
John Graham graduated from the NCAD with a BA in 1993 and an MFA in 2006. With a foundation in drawing and printmaking, his practice has included video and sound installations, writing and curatorial projects. He has exhibited widely in Ireland and internationally, most prominently with Green on Red Gallery, Dublin and Yanagisawa Gallery, Saitama, Japan. Public collections include the Irish Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Ireland, Arts Council of Ireland, Chester Beatty Library, University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin and New York Public Library.
His writing has appeared in artists’ books and gallery publications. His exhibition reviews are published by the Visual Artists’ News Sheet, Enclave Review, Art Monthly, Paper Visual Art Journal and Mirror Lamp Press, among others. A lecturer for more than twenty years, he finished teaching in the Yeats Academy of Arts, Design and Architecture (YAADA) at the Atlantic Technological University, Sligo, in September 2023. He is a part-time student on the MA Art in the Contemporary World programme at the NCAD. He lives in Dublin.
Brian Fayis an Irish artist living in Dublin, his practice is rooted in drawing and he uses the materiality of pre-existing artworks and objects to examine our own complex relationship to time.
He recently completed a national touring survey show which opened in the Highlanes Gallery Drogheda then to Limerick City Gallery of Art and Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre, Cork, Ireland. In 2021 he was awarded a 3 year studio membership with Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin. He undertook an artist residency at the Anni and Josef Albers Foundation, Connecticut, USA in 2022.
His work is in the collections of The National Gallery of Ireland, National Drawing Collection Ireland, The Arts Council of Ireland, The Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Office of Public Works Irish State Collection, University College Cork, Technological University Dublin, and private collections. He was the winner of the 2014 Derwent International Drawing Prize and the RHA AXA Drawing Prize 2016. He is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Technological University Dublin and holds a practice led PhD from Northumbria University, England.
