Artist Andrew Hewish’s practice includes drawings, painting, collage, films, and sculpture. In an enigmatic yet tactile body of work, there exists always the trace of the studio, the artist’s notation, and hand - visible as relic against paper, paint, and object. We see the wood armature of sculpture, a trace of plaster, the hand of the painter, the spontaneous moment of collage. Line and colour are mapped out in a dance of rhythmic restraint, pigment, and form.
The concept of drift is central to the artist’s practice, in the idea that objects and materials emerge through a spontaneous process, a revelation of networking between the works in his studio whether sculpture or two-dimensional making. Material remains at the center of the creative process, “part of an element of unknowability of what the material is going to do which lends itself to accident or traveling beyond the determined end -product.” Intertwined is a sense of archaism and lyricism, inviting the viewer to experience each object as contemplation, its materiality coolly sumptuous.
Hewish seeks to make work that functions beyond surface production or quantities, creating mnemonic imagery of the natural world, architectural spaces, and monuments. In the series Vapeurs made of egg tempera, dry pastel, and pencil on linen there is the residue of the ephemeral, what Hewish describes as a strong material presence but a mysterious quality “an element of strangeness, a slippage of reference point.” Indeed, in this work information eludes us yet invites the eye to wander through the veils of colour and pigment, the looping organic patterns, through the grotto. Within, there is an elemental sensibility intersected with a calligraphic hand. The network of patterns of undulating colour creates a sense of organic rhythm, allowing us to see the spontaneous process of art making, here lies the “internal logic of the studio.”
The Cambridge Spring series reveals pastel patterns as gesture, repeating opening negative space notating the idea of the suspension of time, an ode to weightlessness while the Aeolian pastels are like the traces of fossil. This series began when the artist was on aboard a boat between the Aeolian Islands, the pastels melting in the heat leading to the rolling of pigment, revealed in the motion of meandering pattern borne out of the rhythms of the boat and wind. (Aeolian - arising from the action of the wind, or the volcanic archipelago in the Tyrrhenian Sea).
Hewish’s collages One Liners combine draughtman’s sensibility with the layering of amusing and often pedantic text from old books on subjects like architecture and interior décor, paired with photograms with sfumato like ink and graphite backgrounds. The series began as a collaboration with another artist during a residency, initially as a quite comedic mode. In the series there is a presence of the natural world paired in contrast against the hieratic text excerpts and color tipped old photographs. “Part of the charge of collage is that it maintains the violence or shock while also producing the new in the coherence of that world.”
Many of these works emerged from a response to the “existential events of 2022” creating a space that invites contemplation within the realm of drawing, experience, and studio process. The intention is to produce a sense of mystery, centering on the element of the unexpected. We ask ourselves, is this despair, irreverence or a recording of lost things, images collated and transformed into a poetic ambiguity? Here we arrive at a sense of the enigmatically encyclopedic, the archival, the studio made.
~ Rosa JH Berland
