Calum Wallis

My practice demands a close, bodily relationship with the surfaces from which my drawings take their cue. During extended periods drawing outdoors, my work will fall into a rhythm with the environment and the conditions in which it's being made - a drawing will be eroded by rain or baked in the sun in simultaneity with the form it emulates.

This mode of drawing requires me to work where the forces which shape the world are most visible - a meeting of land and sea or human-made structures in an accelerated state of decay. The time spent making the drawing will document some hours or days in a subjects' journey whose destination will ultimately be the same as its origin - within the body of the earth.

Working at a scale comparable to that which I'm drawing is important, as it forces my bodily relationship to the drawing to mirror my bodily relationship to my subject. Movement is my great joy in life - I'm most content picking my way around places which form a tactile puzzle for the body. This is the reason I'm drawn to stone, where I can scramble over a timeless surface before imitating those planes and handholds in charcoal and graphite.

Bringing these works indoors, they are petrified and domesticated. Severed from the elemental forces which shaped their subjects, my drawings become artefacts of time spent in the world of renewal and decay. Time spent drawing in the dead of a winter night, in the lashing rain of the West Coast, among baking stones at the height of summer