What We Didn't Know Was...

What We Didn't Know Was...
Dan Shipsides / Shipsides and Beggs Projects Drawings
2021
Drawings responding to uncertainty; of engaging uncertainty in responding drawings. Drawings responding in uncertainty;engaging of uncertainty to responding drawings.
Experimenting with ‘pata-perception.
These are a series of over 50, A1 compressed charcoal drawings made plein-air in and around Shipsides’ home in Belfast during the last 2 years of the pandemic and lockdowns.
Accompanying these drawings are two sculptural works, Star Move Star and Sheepish Wolf (Loup) from the ongoing Shipsides and Beggs collaboration and a final drawing of a cow’s skull found at the base of a crag whilst rock-climbing.
The drawing whilst seemingly seem to deviate from what Shipsides’ (and Shipsides and Beggs’) practice would be recognised for, the work still explores their central concern for drawing from lived experience and with what the resulting artwork becomes. In this sense the drawings explore a more than representational approach – in that the drawings, whilst seeming representational, become entities of reality more than a representation of reality. This elaborates a facet of pata-perception (Shipsides 2016) as it furthers the notion of “looking or acting with imagination” as in many ways it is as much the tree that makes the drawing. This echoes Deleuze’s (1980) world-making concept of forming a rhizome with the world rather than an image of it. It also chimes with anarchist ideas of protean prefiguration of reality rather than of representation (Springer 2016), and the ethos in geography studies of non-representation theory (Thrift 1996).
11th September - 16th October 2021
Fenderesky Gallery
31 North Street, Belfast, BT1 1NA tel: 028 90235333 [email protected] www.fendereskygallery.com