Martin Kirkwood’s meditative works on paper are made with line, memory, breath and repetition. As he draws us through landscapes of the mind, abstracted spaces appear redolent of aquatic and terrestrial worlds.

Kirkwood’s fascination with line began as a child, transfixed by illustrations from an old natural history book that used beautiful and dense striations of curved line work to depict the natural world. It was the smooth spaces¹ of the ocean and desert landscape that most transported his childhood imagination. Kirkwood would stare for hours at sand dunes depicted to show the invisible shaping force of the wind, and the form of a whale’s belly drawn to reveal the movements of the ocean.

This early experience moved through Kirkwood’s mind while creating this body of work. The artist allows his mind to wander through the concentration of repetitive line making. The line is therefore a close up of Kirkwood’s travels through motion and time. As he describes:

“As I move through the world, the world also moves through me. This can be likened to breathing, to make a breathing drawing, or a drawing that breathes. The line is rendered in a movement from right to left, the reverse of writing in the western tradition. Drawing what is forgotten, writing what is remembered.”

Kirkwood’s works move from the abstract to the real as we perceive and transform horizontal line into a landscape, strata or frequency.

¹ Delueze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, ‘The Smooth and the Striated’, Athlone Press, London, 1988.

Exhibition launch: Saturday 17 February, 2-4pm

Image credit: Martin Kirkwood