Art review Sasha Grishin
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Winter drawings by Lucienne Rickard. Beaver Galleries, 81 Denison Street, Deakin. Until August 21.
Obsessiveness is the most characteristic feature of Lucienne Rickard's drawings as she works into sheets of drafting film with pencil, deliberately leaving traces of her battle with the image and the technique for all of us to see and contemplate. Each drawing becomes a diary of creativity, a record of the artist's journey in the work where the debris on the battlefield has not been cleared.
She writes about her own art practice: "There is something Samuel Beckett-y about the making of them [the drawings]. The process is repetitive, arduous and often seems ridiculous and insane to me. I feel like this kind of over-investment suits the subject matter – the death thing. Each drawing starts as an empty outline, then as they are made the black detail creeps over until the form is used up."
Born in Lithgow, Rickard studied at the Queensland College of the Arts before moving to Tasmania in 2002, where she remains today. I first saw her work at the Beaver Galleries in 2010, but then she became omnipresent in the Australian art scene and was included in the Primavera exhibition for emerging artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2014.
Drawing is a direct and confronting art form, but experienced a decline in Australian art schools in the 1980s and 1990s, when almost everything that had a skill base went out of the window. This century has marked the great revival of the art of drawing and Rickard's practice occupies a niche in this revival. Her pencil drawings do not articulate forms or describe them, but interpret them and give them a substance and an emotional existence.
Her Bruiser series, dealing with a dog that you meet in nightmares when alone in a dark alleyway, focuses on the fangs and the repetitive layering of pencil marks that indicate the head. Much of the drawing in Bruiser 1 is in the faintest outline, so that the heavily worked head has a dominating presence.
In Bruiser 2, the beast is on its back inviting you to tickle its belly, but the two pronounced white fangs may caution overzealous fingers, despite the owner's reassuring voice that he is friendly and bites rarely. It's Rickard's uncanny ability to build up layers of graphite not purely for mimetic intent, with the velvety quality of the fur or feathers on a severed bird's wing, but also for its emotional and psychological impact, that is one of her rare qualities.
As in previous exhibitions, some of the imagery in this exhibition may be read in terms of "memento mori" and the comments on the fragility of life, such as the faint veins on an autumn leaf or a cat with a mouse in its jaws, but Rickard's drawings possess the breath of life. She presents a very personal and individual comment on forms struggling to establish their existence on a sheet of drafting film, which itself does not have the opaqueness of a sheet of paper and vividly carries the marks of the artist's hand.
Lucienne Rickard presents a formidable exhibition of evocative quality drawings.