Eyes of the Skin

Eyes of the Skin takes its title from Juhani Pallasmaa’s essay on the primacy of touch in a culture given over to the eye — his argument that we see with the whole body, that vision itself is a kind of contact. The drawings answer that idea in ink and charcoal: dense, worked surfaces that ask to be read as much by the hand as by the eye, their blacks pooling and abrading into forms that hover between architecture and skin. At the heart of the show is the Kanju suite, a run of small works drawn on aged ledger paper whose printed rules and columns survive beneath the marks, binding each sheet to an older record of accounts and labour. Set against the larger sheets and the horizontal Double Negative, the suite turns the exhibition into a study of surface — of paper that remembers, and of drawing as something felt before it is seen.

Kaiwan Mehta’s essay on the exhibition is at Eyes of the Skin.