by Abbi Torrance

I am interested in how drawings can work conceptually to convey an idea but also allowing the artists hand and the mistake to play a part in the final work. Drawing for me strips down an idea to the bare essentials.

 

I am interested in the primacy of structure or agency in human behaviour, I look at systems and structures that control us and make drawings to represent this. In capitalist societies the individual is regarded as a self-conscious responsible agent, whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thoughts. This is acquired within the structure of established social practices, which impose on the individual. However, we have learnt from early psychology experiments that we are easily manipulated by authority and even lie to ourselves to fit in with the crowd. Today, we live our lives to a predetermined formula prescribed by powerful global companies.

 

I appropriate choreographed formations to represent human communication and control. A social landscape is built up by combining the formations in diagrams on large scale paper which mimics the way that large corporations see us as data, markets and demographics. These abstract mappings of social networking diagrams and other systems such as feedback systems link the formation drawings to each other, in such we are reduced to a pattern.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS           

 

2012 Bread & Roses, Motorcade/FlashParade, Bristol.

 

2012 Form vs Form, Bearspace Gallery, London

 

2011 Hung, Drawn and Altered: Drawn In, Karin Janssen Project Space, London.

 

2011 MA show Wimbledon School of Art, London

 

2011 Futura Bold Futura Oblique, Nunnery, London

 

2010 Monster, 242 Gallery, Cambridge Heath Rd, London

 

2010  By Appointmant at the ICA, London

 

2010  I swore I sore , Nunnery, London

 

2009 National Open Competition, Chicester

 

2009 Change, Art’s complex, Edinburgh Art Festival

 

2009 The Living Swamp, Quartair Art Gallery, The Hague, Holland

 

2008 Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries, London

 

2008 Awopbopaloobop, Transition Gallery, London

 

2007 New Dawn, Isle of sheppy

 

2006 Emerging Artists, The Copplesten Centre, Peckam

 

2005 May Fete with a twist, Cecil Sharpe House, Camden

 

2005 Healthy Air, Stoke Health, Stowmarket

 

2004 Mesh, Seven Seven, Broadway Market

 

2003 Reduced, Century Gallery, London

 

2003 Women’s Work, Fairfields Art Centre, Basingstoke

 

2003 Mutiny at the Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, London

 

2002 Face 2002, The gallery Cork Street

 

2001 Generate – living with disability, Ferens Art gallery, Hull

 

2001 dna – looking at perception of and reactions to voyeurism and

 

2001 surveillance, Spitz Gallery, London

 

PUBLICATIONS

 

2006 artist profile, Dazed and Confused magazine