Charles Avery Archives

A Parliament of Lines: Aspects of Contemporary Drawing

Our July event will take place at the City Art Centre to see a survey of contemporary Scottish drawing showcasing fifteen artists work, all of whom use drawing as an important element in their practice. Artists include: Charles Avery, Moyna Flannigan, Nathalie de Briey, Paul Chiappe, Euan Gray, Alan Johnston, Andrew MacKenzie and David Shrigley.

A Parliament Of Lines gets its name from social anthropologist Tim Ingold’s studies of growth and movement, in particular his observation that ‘everything is a parliament of lines .  . . to study both people and things is to study the lines they are made of.’ The exhibition is built around five broad themes: The Body, Architecture/Landscape, Minimal Abstraction, Reproduction/Photography and Sculptural Investigation.

Curated by artist Euan Gray, most of the work has been created specifically for the show and includes Nathalie de Briey’s watercolour drawings of incinerated objects from the Hiroshima bomb site drawn on delicate paper; Paul Chiappe’s extraordinary miniature reproductions of old-school photographs; Shrigley animation entitled Friends; Andrew MacKenzie’s meticulous layered images of landscapes and trees; Moyna Flannigan’s new suite of six drawings in ink and gouache depicting the story of Adam and Eve;  and a site specific wall drawing by Alan Johnston.

Drawing is not, as it once was, the foundation on which everything else is built. It is just one option among many, but it has certain intrinsic characteristics, which make it attractive to artists with very different preoccupations.

Joining us to explore these different areas of enquiry will be one of the exhibiting artists, Andrew MacKenzie. Andrew is a painter and an MFA graduate from Edinburgh College of Art. He lives and works in the Scottish Borders and has exhibited with The Contemporary Art Society, London, The Talbot Rice Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Leeds and The Paul Khun Gallery in Calgary, Canada.

The Islanders: An Introduction by Charles Avery

To start the year, we will be visiting the Gallery of Modern Art to discuss The Islanders: An Introduction by Charles Avery, a key figure in a new generation of Scottish artists.

For the past four years, Charles Avery has created texts, drawings, installations and sculptures which describe the topology and cosmology of an imaginary island, whose every feature embodies a philosophical proposition, problem or solution. Avery’s mapping of the island focuses on absurd details from mysterious landscapes, such as the Eternal Forest to strange gods and the inhabitants addiction to gin-pickled eggs. The island’s wildlife is also on show represented in the form of large taxidermy sculpture.

‘The Island is not a parallel world, its part of this world, therefore it is a fiction. I use the word fiction very broadly. History is a fiction, art history is fiction. Maybe reality is the biggest fiction of all!’ Charles Avery.