Speaker: Penny McCarthy, Reader in Fine Art

Title: ‘MY DOCUMENTS’

Penny McCarthy, Reader in Fine Art will present her work in progress.

Penny’s practice is intrinsically concerned with the ways we engage with knowledge and the structures of its acquisition.

Using drawing as a primary method of enquiry, this research examines the archaeology of the facsimile.

Using the files in her ‘My Documents’ folder to guide the discussion, Penny will reflect on particular strands of her research method and the ways in which her practice as an artist maps her own curiosity, constellated through visual works and texts.

Drawing is used to examine the codes, structures and address of source material including texts about the moon landings, political memos and images from art history, raising questions about their value and form. The division between these different themes is uncertain: together they form a network where knowledge of one influences the experience of reading another.

A drawing becomes a text and a text becomes a drawing, asking you to encounter the works in two ways at once. The drawings are usually intensely worked in pencil, attempting to fix the source in time and place. Yet these works often appear unfinished and incomplete, informed by notions of the fragment and the detail in the context of art history and drawing attention to art practice as a space for thinking and imagination.