Carmel Buckley

“Double Takes,” Center for Recent Drawing, London, England, 2012

Solo exhibition

The Center for Recent Drawing (C4RD) calls itself London’s museum space for drawing. Since 2004 C4RD has provided a public exhibition space that is independent and non-commercial. It is located in central London and occupies a whole building dedicated to drawing. In conjunction with the space, the Center has an ongoing series of publications and activities related to the exhibitions and to the support of drawing, along with a residency program. Joel Fisher, an artist, writer, and curator, was invited to curate an exhibition and selected my work for a solo show. He writes, “The work that Carmel Buckley’s drawings represent offers to the world an example of a kind of ‘reliving’ even a re-interpretation of an experience. If interpreted broadly this might have a contribution to make well beyond the boundaries of art. It appears to have similarities to translation, but in reality it is profoundly different.

The switch from a first event, to a second manifestation is not just a matter of degree. Something very human happens in the process. This is not art as reportage but as experience.”

In the exhibition I showed fourteen drawings that engaged with work of Harry Clarke, an Irish illustrator of the early-twentieth century, and J. J. Grandville, a nineteenth-century French illustrator and caricaturist. In the most recent series of drawings I have been tracing around leaves from the garden woodland that surrounds the property where I presently live in. The leaves’ silhouettes spark the development of the drawing and become windows into the imagined world of an interior landscape. The drawings are all made with watercolor pens but use lines constructed from individual marks, like a variety of stitches, questioning the materiality of the work and whether it is made by sewing or drawing. There is a sense of conscious incompleteness in the work, which Andrew Hewish, the founding director of C4RD, comments on: “I always wonder if that is not something that we favour in drawing, particularly fine art drawing over perhaps illustration, particularly cover illustrations from the turn of the century where they are close to painting in a way in that they present a complete world. The most concrete form of painting will present a complete and whole world for us whereas a drawing will often allow us space for some form of completion. Cy Twombly is a great example of someone who treads both grounds to make a painting that is somehow not quite complete.”

During the exhibition, C4RD hosted a panel discussion in the gallery with Andrew Hewish, the founding director of the gallery and lecturer at the Sir. John Cass School of Art; Alison Green, critic, writer, and senior lecturer at Central St. Martins on the BA Criticism, Communication and Curation course; Joel Fisher, artist and writer; and Josh Greer, curatorial assistant at C4RD. This is available to listen to as a podcast on the C4RD website and as an audio file on my website.

Publication forthcoming with transcription of panel discussion and commentary by Joel Fisher.