Sorcha Dallas

It is difficult to free drawing from the viewer’s expectation that it cathartically expresses something of the artist’s deepest nature. Country Grammar, confronts this expectation in such a way that what reigns is the justifiable lightness and capriciousness of mark making, generated by the weighty frivolity of Being. This exhibition of works on paper is a diminutive archive that records the (sporadically disappointing) Glasgow –based artists. The drawings are not wildly impressive or showy, which means you have to step forward rather than back, and look rather than scan.

Gregor Wright’s controlled explosion of angry little drawings take a risk, and dare to hint at a traditionally expressive line, minus irony. His work is already being watered down and has found its way into art student sketchbooks. Kate Davis wants you to sit for her on a stool in front of her drawings, as she presents you with pre-emptive sketches of you being brained by her imagination, whereas Kevin Hutcheson’s watercolours and collages show boredom filtered through the illustrator’s flattening eye.

Haley Tompkins’ gouaches literally record the edges of abstraction, referencing still via Twombly. A few of the drawings/paintings are reductions rather than resolutions, but her pages hold together as a statement of sorts. Sue Tompkins’ text-based work is equally as fleeting, marrying concrete poetry and snippets of empty information and conversation. The work is reminiscent of notes by performance artists or Fluxus instructions, and may seem to be a bit out of place, but does attempt to expand the overall scope of the exhibition.

A fresh sheet of newsprint is successfully met with a stifled excitement in Sally Osborn’s watercolours, where the aqueous medium drips off her slightly wet forms. Representation is shown simply to be a process filtered through monitored perception in Alex Frost’s superrealist graphs. The subject matter may seem intentionally arbitrary, but the minute ciphers add up to something that makes you think otherwise. These works seem more confident than some of the others, but this is often the case when as intricate and time-consuming process dominates traditional expression.