KEVIN TOWNSEND

The act of drawing is at the center of my process. It allows me to examine, understand and articulate the vessels and spaces that contain the substance of these recollections. In the drawings, text and image often work together as a means of depicting the markings in ones mind from the processes of cognition. Hand-written text functions as a representation of speech itself, a kind of narrative that seeks to give voice to memory or to record perceptions as they happen in the moments of making the piece (and reliving the memory). In this way the drawings themselves become vessels—filled with idea and image, the marks encapsulating the time spent making them as well as the memory that spawned them. 

The use of vessels as the locus for memory imparts associations with containment, circulation, distribution, and transportation and offers an opportunity to play with binary oppositions. When confronted with concepts of strength and fragility, fullness and emptiness or presence and absence  our mind naturally creates hierarchies, the implication is that in each case, the second term is inferior, almost parasitic, to the first. These concepts are employed in my work as a means of giving voice to the impact of time on anamnesis and the duplicitous nature of memory.