Soft pastels, ink, pen and pencil on paper, 2022.
This drawing is set in a bespoke broad dark wood frame.
“Stories set in a city like Glasgow which is constantly changing and evolving and adapting will need to concern themselves with the indentations and scars and erosions that the passage of time leave on the urban environment and even more so on the people living in it. In an attempt to capture these dents and bumps, I spent days working on paper with tiny nibs of pens and layering thousands of pen marks on the surface of the paper. This created a very textured and distressed surface with colours layered in. I drew on these surfaces with charcoal and pencil and soft pastels and the disturbed, uneven marks left by the pens made it unpredictable in how the materials would react to and adhere to the surface. I hope that every tiny mark suggest part of the story – what was once a smooth surface is now textured and left altered by the dents and marks I inflicted upon it, just people and places are left textured and altered by experience and passage of time. Life leaves it marks on everything and everyone. Glasgow leaves marks on its people and Glasgow’s people leave their mark on the city” – Coll Hamilton
