DEIRDRE O'Connell has had an interest in imaginary machines for some time now. Her current show appears to pursue this theme by displaying various systems of organisation, such as perspective and urban civilisation, as yet more machines.
The show divides neatly into two parts, the first featuring clay toned work, in which the images are created by etching hair lines into slender layers of mixed oil bar and pastel and the second part containing mainly black and white images, using charcoal and wax in addition to pastel, and drawn with a broader, though more equivocal line.
The "red" pictures are from the O'Connell's "Pompeiana" series, though, as the artist points out, these particular drawings were made in New York. So while the spindly architectural shapes and their colours relate to a scorched Italian setting, their relevance seems to be to urban forms in general.
O'Connell regularly introduces grids, creating a lattice of lines that resolve unsteadily into three dimensional images, while maintaining an anxious relationship with the mathematics of perspective. There are hints that the artist has an interest in Paolo Uccello, but she is more taken with his excitement in intersecting lines than with an ambition to create an illusion of solidity.
The black and white section features looser drawings in which the black shapes of menacing machines fight to stay above the stifling white clouds. Although these images share common ideas with the red drawings, they spring from a quantum weary world, in which strict formulas for mapping the visual world have long since collapsed, and been replaced by improvised solutions.
