Ladders, ladders
everywhere you look. Hmmm...I think it’s fair to say there is a clear theme in
Andy Davey’s exhibition currently on at The Brewhouse! The show features over
30 mixed media drawings, three massive paintings as well as several actual
ladders on the wall – if merely looking at a ladder gives you feelings of
vertigo then look away now!
As a fellow artist
whose own work features agricultural and hand tools, I can understand how easy
it is to become obsessed with drawing/and re-drawing the seemingly mundane. The
simple fact of the matter is, the more you spend time looking at these objects
[ladders/tools] the more reason you find to be fascinated by them. Initially
for me, it was the formal qualities of tools that appealed to me; their shape,
texture, colour and surfaces were something I wanted to make art about. My ‘relationship’
with tools in my own work later gained greater significance as I developed my
practice and began to question it more whilst studying. With Davey’s drawings
[some of which more fragmented and abstract than others] I get the impression
that it is also the formal qualities of, in this case, ladders that is the
basis for his work. The negative shapes and spaces in and around the ladder are
deconstructed and reassembled amongst the (also fragmented) forms of the ladder
itself.
Part of me did
wonder if maybe Andy starts these drawings by chopping up an actual ladder and sticking
it back together. Regardless of the exact process he may use the results are
exciting, dynamic and lively compositions that almost quiver with a sense of
movement and rhythm more familiar to the design of jazz posters than a ladder.
These kinds of work, I anticipate, possibly leave your average viewer thinking,
‘What? That’s a ladder?!’ Who ever knew that the humble ladder could be so
dynamic! Despite the places my work has taken me, what has always appealed to
me about art has always been the same and that’s arts ability to give new
perspective on things that we know well/are familiar with. So it is very
refreshing to be reminded of this in Davey’s exhibition of work.
If anything the exhibition isn’t really about ladders at
all, it’s about drawing and as the title suggests, ‘work’ and ‘surface’ which
Davey has done even to the extent of drawing on the gallery walls themselves!
The painted surfaces are layered, dragged and scrapped through revealing and
disguising the structure of the ladder in the work so despite the dominance of
the ladder as a ‘grid-like’ structure the work doesn’t look as geometric and
slick as you might expect. They are much more gestural and expressive with the
ladder often emerging out of a cloud-like vapour. Yet despite all the symbolism
that the ladder and the cloud-like forms in some of the drawings could suggest I
don’t, personally, read too much into them metaphorically. They could quite
easily become, ladders to heaven, ladders to earth, Jacob’s ladder and many
other sorts of associations (and maybe to some people they do) but for me they
are more formal than that, a more compositional thing used to create an
image/mark making/expressive. Who knows? Maybe they have personal significance
or attachment to Andy, we’ll find out at the artist’s talk on February 6th
(see note below). I find myself making links between Davey’s drawings and the
work of, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers and
Richard Hamilton’s paintings all of whom have depicted objects in their work
but they’re [the objects] are always a kind of trace of the whole thing and it’s
often not entirely clear what you are looking at. I prefer Andy’s more black
and white drawings, as I’m not so keen on some of the colour combinations on
some of the coloured works –which could just be down to a matter of taste. I’d
like to know how he does choose his colours, a question I will save for
Wednesday 6th. The only other thing was that I wouldn’t have minded
a ladder of my own so I could see some of the drawings close up as they are hung
high (mostly because there are so many and the hanging also mimics the height
of the actual ladder on the adjacent wall) but then maybe I just need grow
taller!
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