Drawing Room presents Nicola Tyson, Beyond the Trace

Drawing Room presents Beyond the Trace, a solo exhibition of works on paper by British born, New York based artist Nicola Tyson. Predominantly known as a painter, Tyson also works with photography, performance, the written word and more recently sculpture. Underpinning all of her practice is drawing.

Beyond the Trace will be the first solo exhibition in the UK of Tyson’s drawings.  It will include a range of work: sketchbook pages; ‘daily drawings’, made since 2015 and posted on social media; large graphite drawings; and life-sized ink drawings made especially for this exhibition. Working intuitively and from memory, these gestural pencil drawings are a reimagining of the female body; they are highly animated, androgynous, self-contained and surreal.

Isolated on the page, or positioned against lightly drawn lines – suggestive of a landscape – Tyson’s ‘self-organised’ pencil figures hold a strong presence. Appendages that are part human, part animal morph; lumpy torsos sprout spindly legs or a bird-like beak;  a hollow-eyed figure might look out from under a heavy cloak-cum-body part.  In Tyson’s work, a piece of clothing possesses as much figurative potential as a body part.

“The frock is my ‘vacant muse’, as are pelmets, fringes, knickers, bed skirts… all are cathected and repurposed with my pencil”