Conceived to further explore the theme of ‘Made Up’, The Drawing Room at Tate Liverpool highlights the importance of the medium of drawing in the cognitive and physical act of making up.

The act of drawing is familiar to all, provoking childhood memories: we are all taught to draw, and drawing is often used as a means of expressing our hopes and dreams, or creating fantasy places, and is strongly connected to the idea of story-telling. This room at Tate Liverpool contains work by four artists who frequently use drawing as their primary practice.

In recent years Charles Avery has been preoccupied with The Islanders, a project the artist feels is never-ending. Inspired by his childhood on the Inner Hebrides in Scotland, he describes the topography and cosmology of an imaginary island. Although linked to ideas of philosophy, mathematics and metaphysics, Avery’s drawings come from his imagination. They pose philosophical paradoxes that are apparent in both the real world and the imaginary one he has created. Avery will present an installation of recent drawings.

Avish Khebrehzadeh creates drawn animations often overlain onto drawings or paintings. Through a pared-down aesthetic her works explore the human condition, and identities in transition. Khebrehzadeh builds up elusive narratives that allude to ideas and emotions questioning universal themes of time, identity and relationships between humanity and the natural world. Theater II / Ill Affection (2007), inspired by a Thomas Mann short story, explores the dysfunctional relationship between human and animal and the wider relationship between humankind and the world it inhabits.

Rachel Goodyear’s drawings present captured moments where characters are trapped between the real and the fictional in a place where rules of social engagement no longer apply. Each work and the characters that reside within it are preoccupied by their own existence and the boundaries of the surface they are drawn upon. Goodyear shows her drawings not in isolation but with many others, creating an ever changing sequence of new narratives. Goodyear will present an installation of recent drawings.

Roman Ondak’s works play with our perceptions of time and space, merging past, present and future. He subtly captures social and cultural behaviour, dreams, fantasies and ideas. Working within the parameters of conceptualism, his work involves the participation of others. He plays the role of instructor, giving a theme or idea for his work to the participants yet allowing their individual creativity to come through in the work presented. In Futuropolis (2006) Ondak invited his friends and relatives to draw their vision of a megalopolis of the future, resulting in one hundred drawings presented in a naïve, child-like style. Despite encompassing hope and fantasy for the future, the works rest upon the reality of the participant’s present social situation.

Kyla McDonald