Carolyn Eskdale: Lonquists' back room drawings

Carolyn Eskdale: Lonquists' back room drawings, is a suite of twelve large-scale frottage drawings taken from interior panels that previously clad the demolished 1960s rear sleep-out of a pre-war Australian suburban weatherboard home.

Frottage might be seen as drawing a surface back up through paper, like a recovery of both memory and human absence. Eskdale’s drawing action involves a soft scumbling process using slightly different hues and grades of graphite blocks to reveal the subtle textures of the surface grain: ridges of framing and ornamental strapping, and traces of pentimenti, scratches and indents, soft and hard edges, perforations and breaks, water-damage and grime. Multiple ‘passes’ are made over each drawing, accumulating and revealing blooming impressions formed from each panel’s varied conditions of decay and rot; a brittle, feathered and fragile materiality.

Installed in the gallery, the drawings function as both an index of Lonquists' back room and a physical/temporal encounter for the viewer. The installation refers to the actual architectures of the room; its north, east, south and western wall drawings are placed with reference to the original space, thus manifesting the presence of one place into and onto another. The architectural relinking of the dismantled panels also calibrates a slow material transition that places the long-past inhabitant, the artist and the viewer into a continuous undoing and redoing of space.