The work of Ralph Macartney centres on his fascination with the strangeness, humour and dramatic potentials resident in existing objects and recognition of their already fully realised identities. It is a process in which drawing operates in the widest sense as delineation, capture and a constant testing of boundaries.
This is an ongoing search in which erasure, lost moments, the utilisation of the unregarded and even awareness of the sublime caught unawares and lurking in unexpected corners all play a part.
Gathering, filtering, selecting, sorting; a compiler of a journal of significant, fragile events; a finder rather than a seeker; opportunist and radiant rather the linear in sensibility; his role in his own work might best be described as that of a curator of serendipities.
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