Ainsley Wilcock
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This body of work has explored and reflected upon how drawing can be a way of knowing the world, not only the visible real but the "marvellous". I use drawing as a mode of understanding my embodied perception within the world. My research centred on the concept of pareidolia, which has had a place in visual culture since Leonardo da Vinci advised artists to seek inspiration from stains on walls, ashes of a fire, shadows or clouds. Sometimes found, sometimes actively manipulated my everyday, material reality is drawn to reveal hidden grotesqueries and hauntings.
Pareidolia is a phenomenon defined as the human tendency to seek meanings and patterns and a sense of the familiar through arbitrary objects. A process of repetitively and monotonously experiencing abnormal meanings, that is entirely self-referential, solipsistic and paranoid. Pareidolia has evolved and adapted to describe a broader experience of tendencies in human perception. The grotesque might be conceived of as a subset or by-product of pareidolia; through imaginative and interpretive processes we tend to perceive and construe patterns and forms as macabre and grotesque composites.
My drawings rely on the extent to which the subject matter (unoccupied piles of clothing) is read as anthropomorphic. Often, the fabric or clothing suggests something humanoid: the remnants of a body, its flayed skin. These elements of the pareidolian grotesque are buoyant, comical, playful, burlesque and absurdist, or more monstrous, frightful, sinister and macabre. They may conjure one pole or both. Shadows echo the anthropomorphic grotesque qualities of the object with which they are connected. Some drawings remain vague, ambiguous and ‘open’ to interpretation in line with a paranoiac experience attached to pareidolia.
A realist aesthetic evokes presence and veracity of the subject matter, and succumbing to perceptual schisms; to induce such obsessive feelings involved in seeing, perceiving, and expecting patterns. Many of the drawings retain an excess of original white: a negative space, an absence; something and nothing; a psychological something in the nothing. There are empty clothes and there is empty space, yet inhabited clothes and inhabited space. Presence and absence seem to collapse in upon each other, drawing attention to the possibilities of a metaphysical life and the promise of, or capacity for something more.
These composites typify a contemporary approach to drawing through transhistorical and hybrid modes of representation. They are collectively redolent of a history of visual apperceptions, deceptions, distortions, and mimetic representations that date to Plato’s allegory and Pliny the Elder’s myths on the origin of drawing. Materiality of absence through allusions to puppetry, and empty piles of clothing provides the armature of my work. The subject of a drawing is actually an amalgamation of subject and object and entity, the ‘self’ and the ‘other’—that is characteristic of pareidolia, the anthropomorphic, and the grotesque.
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
150 x 128 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
2013
coloured pencil on paper
76.5 x 112 cm
I acknowledge the Dharawal people as the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land on which I was born, live, and work. I pay respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging.