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Tom Robertshaw

"Images are mediations between the world and human beings" Vilem Flusser

For myself drawing is a pathway
in connecting in what we see and how we think. My drawings exist as a manifestation of an interest into activity which alludes to alternative ways of looking, percieving and digesting the world around us.

Often using photographs as a referential armature my drawings are the result of an act of translation where an image ultimately becomes entangled and warped in its transition to a new surface. The photograph
is like a filter which allows a distance from
an image.

When I make a work I do not necessarily think of a slowing of time but of the flatness and depth in the image and the way I can literally draw this out of the page. The simple act of making marks on a piece of paper becomes an intense exploration of how the lines of representation and abstraction can dissolve into an animated artificial surface.

Unlike the inferred language of the photographic image, this hybrid surface lays its structure bare to us to question the value we as spectators place on what
we perceive everyday.

Consequently when beginning to draw
I aspire to create a surface where the pencil mark is free to describe but does not disguise the fact that it is dust on a page, an object in front of us.