When the light appears (view from the World Trade Center)
70mm x 50mm , pencil, crayon and scalpel on paper
70mm x 50mm , pencil, crayon and scalpel on paper
"I first encountered a drawing depicting a panoramic view from the summit of the World Trade Centre. This frozen moment – a monumental ‘presence’ re-enacted – is loaded with meaning from the contemporary vantage point. Inscriptions of lapsed time, monuments, war and the slippages of binary terms and their prescribed meanings – good / evil, ally / enemy, local / global, past / present."
Joanne Laws from 'On the Threshold of Recognition’, Visual Artists Ireland Newsletter
Joanne Laws from 'On the Threshold of Recognition’, Visual Artists Ireland Newsletter
Diomede Islands
This pair of drawings show the Diomede Islands inbetween Alaska and Russia in the Bering Straight. The international date line runs between them. If you are stood on one island looking at someone (through a telescope) the person you see is in the day before or the day after depending on which island you're on.
Four Corners
These four drawings are one together one work about territory and repetition. They are a done in goldpoint and are derived from a piece Maeve Brennan wrote for the New Yorker magazine in her Long Winded Lady column. They contain the thought that an individuals operations can for a myriad of reasons be defined within a certain jurisdiction and that the behaviours produced within those boundaries become things which are not arbitrary and although in some ways have a symbiotic function, they are always structured within a hierarchy of power.
Extract from: The Long-Winded Lady by Maeve Brennan
"LATELY I have been taking oblong walks, staying between Fifty-ninth Street and Forty-fifth Street and keeping to four avenues — Sixth, Fifth, Madison, and Park. I am generally by myself, and I find that the separate personalities of these four avenues within this area have impressed themselves so insistently on me that I want to make a few remarks about them.
I have been searching for some good thing to say about Sixth Avenue, but I have failed in my search. Sixth Avenue shows its true self only during the two hours after dawn, when it is almost empty of life. During those hours, in the silence and the nice clean light, the eerie, unsubstantial disorderliness of those blocks of structures becomes apparent, and anyone walking alone through that ugliness can see without any trouble that Sixth is not a human thoroughfare at all but only a propped-up imitation of a thoroughfare, and that its purpose is not to provide safe or pleasant or beautiful passage for the people of the city but to propitiate, even if it is only for a little while, whatever the force is that feeds on the expectation of chaos. Those blocks, as far as you can see, offer nothing except the threat, or the promise, that they will come tumbling down. The buildings have about them nothing of the past and nothing of the future, no intimation of lives spent or to come, but only a reminder of things that should not have happened and a guarantee of things that should not come to pass.
Fifth Avenue is different. Fifth Avenue is fine and wide and satisfactory in every respect, but the shops all seem very far apart. They are not, of course — they are side by side, in the usual way — but walking takes longer and is more of an effort on Fifth than on the other avenues because the width of the sidewalks encourages a zigzag progress; instead of walking in or with or against the crowd, as I do on an ordinary sidewalk, I am encouraged by all the extra space to dodge around the crowd and in and out of it. Fifth Avenue is at its best after eight o’clock at night and until eight o’clock in the morning. On shopping nights it does not put on its deserted look until after ten, and on Sunday mornings it is quiet enough even after ten.
Park Avenue wears such an air of vast indifference to humanity that it is never interesting to walk on. Its face is closed, and the beautiful beds of flowers that are planted all along its center only hint that the view would be duller without them. Park Avenue looks friendly at Christmastime, when all those big trees are lighted up, but it is obviously an avenue to be splendidly lived on, and not to be looked at or walked on.
My favorite avenue, good at any hour of the day or night, and at any season, is Madison. Whenever I walk along Madison Avenue, I think of fine clothes and gaiety and of the possibility of having both at once. The avenue, which seems to get narrower and more interesting every year, has a frivolous, relaxed air. It is even romantic. The shop windows are so close to the ground, or seem so close to the ground, and so near, that no matter how fast you walk you cannot help seeing what is in them, and the shop windows on the second floor are often even more fascinating than the ones below, so that you have to bend your head back to try to guess exactly what it is up there that you know you want very badly — the color of it is so nice or the shape so mystifying. Heaven forbid that there should ever be a riot in the city, but if there is I will go straight over to Madison Avenue with my stone or brick and I will shut my eyes and just throw, because there is hardly a window along there that does not contain something I would like to have.
All this time I have been trying to think of one good thing to say about Sixth Avenue. Now I remember the walk I took there on the morning of the last big snow. I was living on West Fifty-eighth Street at the time, and I was out of my hotel just after dawn, and I walked all the way down to Forty-fifth Street and saw hardly a soul. The snow had fallen thickly and was still falling. There was no sign that the snow would ever stop falling, and as I looked about me, making my way along, I could see no reason for it ever to stop falling. I looked at the buildings closest to me, and then I looked as far up as their tops, which were hidden in a hazy confusion of sky and snow, and I looked along Sixth Avenue as far as the falling snow would allow, and wherever I looked, the buildings had shed their tacky, temporary air, and appeared theatrically lost and desolate, as though they were in a movie and would soon flicker away and disappear forever. Therefore, I have this to say for Sixth Avenue: It is a perfect place for snow, and snow should always be falling there, tons and tons and tons of snow, making the avenue just about impassable, so that anybody managing to struggle through there could look at it with affection, because Sixth Avenue possesses a quality that some people acquire, sometimes quite suddenly, which dooms it and them to be loved only at the moment when they are being looked at for the very last time".
"LATELY I have been taking oblong walks, staying between Fifty-ninth Street and Forty-fifth Street and keeping to four avenues — Sixth, Fifth, Madison, and Park. I am generally by myself, and I find that the separate personalities of these four avenues within this area have impressed themselves so insistently on me that I want to make a few remarks about them.
I have been searching for some good thing to say about Sixth Avenue, but I have failed in my search. Sixth Avenue shows its true self only during the two hours after dawn, when it is almost empty of life. During those hours, in the silence and the nice clean light, the eerie, unsubstantial disorderliness of those blocks of structures becomes apparent, and anyone walking alone through that ugliness can see without any trouble that Sixth is not a human thoroughfare at all but only a propped-up imitation of a thoroughfare, and that its purpose is not to provide safe or pleasant or beautiful passage for the people of the city but to propitiate, even if it is only for a little while, whatever the force is that feeds on the expectation of chaos. Those blocks, as far as you can see, offer nothing except the threat, or the promise, that they will come tumbling down. The buildings have about them nothing of the past and nothing of the future, no intimation of lives spent or to come, but only a reminder of things that should not have happened and a guarantee of things that should not come to pass.
Fifth Avenue is different. Fifth Avenue is fine and wide and satisfactory in every respect, but the shops all seem very far apart. They are not, of course — they are side by side, in the usual way — but walking takes longer and is more of an effort on Fifth than on the other avenues because the width of the sidewalks encourages a zigzag progress; instead of walking in or with or against the crowd, as I do on an ordinary sidewalk, I am encouraged by all the extra space to dodge around the crowd and in and out of it. Fifth Avenue is at its best after eight o’clock at night and until eight o’clock in the morning. On shopping nights it does not put on its deserted look until after ten, and on Sunday mornings it is quiet enough even after ten.
Park Avenue wears such an air of vast indifference to humanity that it is never interesting to walk on. Its face is closed, and the beautiful beds of flowers that are planted all along its center only hint that the view would be duller without them. Park Avenue looks friendly at Christmastime, when all those big trees are lighted up, but it is obviously an avenue to be splendidly lived on, and not to be looked at or walked on.
My favorite avenue, good at any hour of the day or night, and at any season, is Madison. Whenever I walk along Madison Avenue, I think of fine clothes and gaiety and of the possibility of having both at once. The avenue, which seems to get narrower and more interesting every year, has a frivolous, relaxed air. It is even romantic. The shop windows are so close to the ground, or seem so close to the ground, and so near, that no matter how fast you walk you cannot help seeing what is in them, and the shop windows on the second floor are often even more fascinating than the ones below, so that you have to bend your head back to try to guess exactly what it is up there that you know you want very badly — the color of it is so nice or the shape so mystifying. Heaven forbid that there should ever be a riot in the city, but if there is I will go straight over to Madison Avenue with my stone or brick and I will shut my eyes and just throw, because there is hardly a window along there that does not contain something I would like to have.
All this time I have been trying to think of one good thing to say about Sixth Avenue. Now I remember the walk I took there on the morning of the last big snow. I was living on West Fifty-eighth Street at the time, and I was out of my hotel just after dawn, and I walked all the way down to Forty-fifth Street and saw hardly a soul. The snow had fallen thickly and was still falling. There was no sign that the snow would ever stop falling, and as I looked about me, making my way along, I could see no reason for it ever to stop falling. I looked at the buildings closest to me, and then I looked as far up as their tops, which were hidden in a hazy confusion of sky and snow, and I looked along Sixth Avenue as far as the falling snow would allow, and wherever I looked, the buildings had shed their tacky, temporary air, and appeared theatrically lost and desolate, as though they were in a movie and would soon flicker away and disappear forever. Therefore, I have this to say for Sixth Avenue: It is a perfect place for snow, and snow should always be falling there, tons and tons and tons of snow, making the avenue just about impassable, so that anybody managing to struggle through there could look at it with affection, because Sixth Avenue possesses a quality that some people acquire, sometimes quite suddenly, which dooms it and them to be loved only at the moment when they are being looked at for the very last time".