PROVIDE SPACE: EXHIBITION

Forms of attention
By Graesen Joyce and Helen Majewski

At first glance, these drawings come from different worlds. Joyce presents soft, quiet, and intimate
walnut ink drawings and oil monotypes of carefully arranged books, vessels, and found natural
objects. Her slow, deliberative process of setting up a still life echoes her consideration of each
mark as it is placed. Majewski draws what is around her: sometimes an arranged still life but more
frequently a messy studio or garden, or her artist friends at work. Her charcoal and watercolour
drawings are bold, transforming the everyday detritus of a room or garden into a complex pattern
of tone, interwoven with moments of wildness and desperation, but also the freedom of playful
shorthand. For both artists, working from observation—and the extended looking it entails—is a
process of becoming attuned to certain kinds of energy. Joyce sees the undulations in her shells
and rocks as physical manifestations of the complex natural forces that shaped them. Majewski is
energised by the patterns and relationships she senses in the commonplace complexity that
surrounds her; frustration at the impossibility of capturing everything leads to moments of high-
intensity drawing.
 
Transient experiences of time and space are transformed into something lasting. Forms hold their
attention, and in turn, their attention is made into form.



Graesen Joyce is a painter and printmaker from St. Louis, Missouri. Most often working from direct
observation, her experiences of looking become meditations on attention. She explores awe and
the banal, as well as her relationship with the natural world and her immediate surroundings.

Helen Majewski is a painter who lives and works in Boorloo/Perth. She works from observation,
and through painting, drawing, and painted paper collage, she discovers patterns and organisation
in the apparent chaos of the everyday.