London based artist Elizabeth Drury’s solo show Objects in Transition is on display at Mumbai’s Akara Art. Born in 1991, Drury works primarily in drawing medium. The artist has exhibited frequently across the UK since 2012. The artists graduated in 2014 with a BA(Hons) in Drawing and Applied Arts from the University of the West of England. She was also awarded the Nigel Kings lake-Jones Prize for drawings. She finished her Masters in Painting from Royal College of Art in 2017 where she has been selected for the Travers Smith Award Programme.
Akara Art is showcasing 12 graphite and pastel works on paper which are based upon the traditions of still life. Her drawings play upon the push and pull of perception, the uncertainty of memory and the anxieties of change through the manipulation of objects over time.
Drury finds a personal connection to the spaces and the structured process of observational drawing which allows a moment of personal interpretation between looking and responding to the objects. She works with graphite or familiar colour (through pastel or coloured pencil) and further removes the objects from their source, creating a dependency on shape and texture as a means of understanding the form. She believes there’s also an interlocking of past and present time through the layers of details that this process creates. Elizabeth wants the objects to become relics or monuments of the laborious process of observational drawing they were filtered through.
Through her retelling of the scene Drury is able to charm the objects into movement. Yet the works are entirely ambivalent, and it is as though they are themselves in a process of working out an inner anxiety. There is the friction then, of what is real and what an assembled fiction is—and perhaps it is in the gap between the two that we may thoughtfully rest. She names the objects she uses as transitional, seeing them as points of mediation between the reality of her studio and the filters of her imagination—between this world and another.
The show is on view till 17 March