The Exterminating Pencil Vol.4: 'Letters of Love, Hate, War and Peace', Caves x Cathedral Cabinet
Exhibition Text
30.08.23 - 16.09.23
Graphite bombs, also known as soft bombs, are non-explosive weapons used to disable electrical power stations. The impact can shut down the electricity of large cities and even small regions for at least 24 hours. It works by aero-dropping canisters with treated graphite carbon particles that interfere with major electrical grids. For the most part, this is a harmless weapon with minimal collateral damage. But imagine a citywide black out…my home coloured dark with metallic luster…conjuring a Melbourne Gotham illustrated in pencil.
I’m reading my future in the teacup of graphite bomb droppings. Only mine only. Only today only. Only one only.
It itches me, the scratchy sound of pencil on paper. Could it be heard through the lead lined doors? It reminds me of a simple time that lacked filler words: mm, uhh, like, umm, you know? A time when writing and drawing bled into one another. Where the crossword cryptic was synonymous with every day text. A time when darkness contradicted a life force and the tensions of electricity were damaged by a flicker. A time to draw our words in secret.
Artists of this show witness spinal tap in accordance with their practice. To create, muscle memory is nobody's friend and when it comes to the pencil, it’s weaponised. A piece of paper quickly combusts as does my ego. The pencil is presently in storage, meandering up and down a ship. The pencil promotes the fundamentals of the drawing. Although it may be a sliver of graphite wrapped in wood, it is a reminder of the length between thought and action.
My love for the grey area of life, a reclusive space of non-thought and non-action, gathers beyond the page. Such as the in-between phases of life on the cusp of teenagehood where thoughts go awry. The space between the Cathedral and the Cave exists for a special moment. The Exterminating Pencil Vol.4 is upstairs and downstairs, A to B, except language shows us that getting from A to B varies across the world. An instrument that can capture the in-between space of A and B, perhaps even exist right in the middle, is the pencil. The marks it makes are transferred from grey matter in the brain to grey matter on the canvas. As Donatien Grau reminds us in Stories of Almost Everyone (2018), “myths are vertical, mythologies are horizontal”. These bridges occupy more than the staircase of the building, instead, they occupy a degree of muscular stretch, a real push on the meanings of mark-making. Whole lifetimes are created in the space of a staircase. Places for hiding and kissing, where people grow up and down. The exhibited artworks greet you and send you off and vice versa. They are guarding the gates to heaven and hell. They are the Angels of extermination, the cogs in the machine of distance.