What is the future of drawing in a digital age? Aidan Dunne visits an exhibition looking at its role within the fast-changing cultural landscape
Drawing on Space at the Project could actually be regarded as one corner of a triangular programme, which also incorporates a book with the same title, and a participatory event by Amy Plant at the Limerick City Art Gallery. The City Art Gallery houses the National Collection of Drawing, and Plant is documenting the responses of members of the public to items in the collection.
One of the striking things about the Project exhibition is that, on entering, you discover that you have already been inside it: Brian Walsh's drawing takes the form of an architectural construction that in part provides a modified entrance to the gallery space.
Drawing is a universal human activity, though it is one characteristic of childhood that, for the most part, people outgrow, particularly with the advent of the digital age. It is no longer regarded as the fine art staple that it once was.
Proficiency in CAD has largely supplanted a level of graphic skill as a basic requirement in many fields of design. In fact computers have invaded numerous areas that were previously the preserve of manual drawing, including the drafting of detailed weather maps. But the prospect of drawing significantly fading away as an ability is surely groundless. It is simply too useful, too versatile, too immediate and too instinctive.
Drawing on Space takes cognisance of the fast-changing cultural landscape and examines the role of drawing within it. The book and the show come from The Drawing Room in London, which was established in 2000 and the aims of which include the establishment of "a dedicated space for drawing". With this spatial rationale in mind, The Drawing Room looked around at the work of artists "who use the principle of drawing in different media to articulate the notion of space". The interrelationship between drawing and space has long been strong, particularly since the development of Renaissance perspective, not least because, as artists, architects and designers are well aware, drawing is an extraordinarily direct and powerful way to generate a conceptual, virtual space. But our notions of space have been transformed by the technologies of travel and communications, and if you leaf through the book and visit the exhibition, you are likely to find your conception of what drawing is or might be is challenged and may even be transformed.
This holds even more so for the book, perhaps because there is so much more material by more artists in it. I would love to have seen the diaries of the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi, for example. Densely worked pages from the diaries of the late Mohamedi are reproduced in the book. Besides providing a record in the conventional sense of a diary, they are beautiful graphic creations which visualise time as rhythmic patterns on the page.
Constant Nieuwenhuys's imaginary map, New Babylon Nord, also looks like a terrific piece of work. A network floating against a void, it might be a city, but it functions very effectively as an evocation of cyberspace.
Brian Walsh's wooden installation is a three-dimensional representation of a structure in terms of classical perspective, a series of gable-ended forms diminishing rapidly to a single vanishing point sited diagonally across the gallery. He is by no means the only artist to make the leap from two to three dimensions.
Oliver Zwink's installation Leak is perhaps a little too convincing. He has used only ink, cardboard and paper, but with these basic materials he has reduced a whole corner of the gallery to a convincing simulacrum of a patch of dirty, sodden, rotten and all too recognisable backstreet, the kind of thing you can see in any city or town. Reproduced in the book, his drawings are busy architectural fantasies of jumbled, eclectic metropolises in which the natural and architectural landscapes converge. They might be utopian or dystopian, depending on your point of view.
Russell Crotty mingles high- and low-tech in his celestial drawings. He records vast panoramas of the night sky with ballpoint pens, which sounds like an exercise in futility. But somehow it works. His copious, meticulous hatching imparts a real sense of scale, richness and depth, punctuated by intense pinpoints of light and vast starry clouds. In the book these works appear flat, in the gallery they are wrapped around big globes, inverting the usual order of things.
By comparison with the sweeping sense of transparent space in her reproduced drawings of buildings, Silke Schatz's sole exhibited drawing recalls, for those who can remember that far back, the days of spirograph drawing sets, and is a bit of a damp squib. Perhaps she is trying to visualise something not easily represented by graphic means. Graham Gussin is fairly inventive in that regard, with his video of a graphic output of - what? It's hard to know, it could be light levels or speech, which turns up in one of his reproduced works, but it is visually striking and oddly compelling.
Virtually anything can be used to make a drawing, as Tomoko Takehashi demonstrated with his assemblages of accumulated objects and debris over a two-month period last year in New Delhi, a project recorded in a series of photographs. This trail of materials became a record of the time spent there, and was richly stocked with local colour and texture.
With an expanded sense of what a drawing might be, you could say that, just around the corner at the Gallery of Photography, another sort of animated drawing is in progress.
There, John Tuomy and Richard Torchia have collaborated to convert the gallery space into a giant, walk-in camera. You can see a vast, upside-down projection of the scene outside on Meeting House Square. Whatever about the complication of calculating the optics, the simplicity of the materials involved is startling, and the living, unfolding image has an hypnotic, hallucinatory quality.
Drawing on Space is at Project, East Essex Street until September 20th. The book, Drawing on Space, is available at Project for €20. Square, 2002, an installation by Oliver Zwink at 37 Merrion Square, runs in conjunction with Drawing on Space. Architectural Optics is at the Gallery of Photography until September 12th.