"Drawing, within the visual arts, seems to hold the position of being 
closest to pure thought." (John Elderfield)


Drawing as an immediate and transitive action, facilitates the visual 
expression of space, time and experience. Against a backdrop of 
increasingly sophisticated imaging technology, and an expanded use of 
hybrid media within the arts, the activity of drawing assumes a dynamic 
and shifting position between centrality and the margins. It is from 
this unique tension of the understood and the emerging, the learned 
versus the instinctual that drawing becomes possibility.

The three artists selected for "Second Nature" all use drawing as a 
means to negotiate complex ideas about how we might know, understand 
and structure the world. Barb Bondy's drawings evince her desire to 
comprehend cognitive processes at their deepest level, attempting at 
once to put visual form to hidden inner physiological mechanisms while 
simultaneously exploring external phenomena. The drawings themselves 
begin to function as a two-dimensional membrane or threshold through 
which these correlative ideas pass.

The work of Christopher McNulty emphasizes process. A simple, singular 
decision is extrapolated and unpacked to reveal large-scale 
consequences. The minor irregularities of hand and eye register across 
the surface to reveal the inherent flaws of recapitulation as the work 
slowly transmutes. These are careful, measured works, imbued with a 
lightness that belies their philosophical weight.

In contrast, Moira Scott Payne utilizes domestically sourced materials 
from anonymous individuals who she identifies only by their postal 
addresses. Her visual kleptomania of ornamental vocabulary collides 
with the consumer culture of glossy magazines and domestic furnishings 
to reveal the conflicting desires and expectations of the everyday. 
Identity defined by the sum of our belongings; a tangled confusion of 
dissonant styles and idioms emerge to expose the stress fractures of 
contemporary living. Each drawing exists as a personal inventory that 
questions the aggregate value assigned to our material aspirations, 
against which the delineation of private and public space 
simultaneously collapses.

While the individual works selected for this exhibition acknowledge the 
extant potential of drawing, it is my expectation that as a body of 
work, they establish a dialogue between and through one another that 
will more assertively engage in the broader critical discourse that 
surrounds the nature of drawing within contemporary art practice.