With a new drawing on the first blackboard every morning, the figure very slowly walks deeper and deeper into the distance, until hevanishes completely into the weathered blackness. In contrast to the more monumnetal upright blackboard with the deceptively abstracted cormorant drawings, the figure doesn't so much as float in a void, but he is swallowed by it.

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In the second blackboard, there is a claustrophobic density, and almost heavy breathing consuming the linear detail, so from afar the blackboard is faint and abstracted, almost as if it has been erased and redrawn several times, in suspended animation. It is only upon closer inspection that the tortured linear detail is revealed. There is a similar density overwhelming the figure study in the first blackboard, but it is a quieter, venerable weight, a dormant, slowly sinking weight that, under the guise of negative space, is in fact pure and total entropy.

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The ontology of this oblivion is validated in the context of the paradoxical 'choice' offered in the film To Hell or to Connacht. The week-long trudge that the figure drawing endures is a perversion or corruption of the animation and of the fictional mythological binary Ocras & Olcas.

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Chalk and charcoal drawings are an inhernetly volatile medium, complimetnary to organic animation. the memory or shadow (or perhaps anti-shadow?) of each erased drawing in the sequence is lightly visible, and mimics the Irish oral tradition and cycle of how mythology occurs. 

It also references the erosion of drawing, and the legacy of Joseph Beuys' drawings of 'Newgrange inspired walk patterns' that were erased from this very blackboard in 1974.

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-Review 2019

Photo credit Mike Hannon