The Void

From Stella Rosa McDonald…

Each one of Anne Judell’s drawings inspires comparisons: like a ship in the night, like a hive, like fur. They appeal to our sense of simile but the impulse to draw on likenesses proves false; they have a complex logic, they are too real and too mysterious to be valid as simple descriptions. They are not abstractions of existing forms but drawings of beginnings and endings. Judell captures infinitudes in a way that makes you wonder if she has figured out how to hit pause on the universe.

Previously described by Luke Davies as a documentarian of emptiness, Judell is an artist who makes metaphors and maybes concrete. Using acrylic, pastel, charcoal and gesso in Void, Judell works at the surface of paper so much that it can appear to be expertly—and minutely—folded. The artist acts as a temporal scribe, noting the comings and goings of light and time. A single pastel drawing may take Judell up to four years to complete. Some drawings, made from the subtlest use of the colour spectrum, appear to depict the microscopic elements of a single shade, the tiny dots of light from which matter seems to be made. The drawings in Void are about scale on every level—the size of us, the extent of the universe, the length of breath—blueprints for an idea of the universe.

Until October 4
Janet Clayton Gallery, Waterloo
Pic: Anne Judell, Void 10, 2013 -14, 78 x 53cm, mixed media on Hahnemuhle copy. Courtesy of Janet Clayton Gallery.