Title

Light years: Sketchbooks by Ray Pearce.

Venues

Bendigo Art Gallery (14 July 2007 – 12 August 2007)

Date

(2007)

Summary

Single-artist exhibition. Located: Australia (VIC). Drawings

Country of context

Australia

Abstract

Light Years: Sketchbooks of Ray Pearce. This exhibition presents the art of Bendigo-based Ray Pearce. A practising artist for more than thirty years, Pearce is predominantly recognised for the ceramics and sculptures that he exhibits locally and in Melbourne. Pearce is also a ceramics and sculpture teacher, first teaching at Bendigo Institute of Technology and more recently at Deakin University and Bendigo Regional Institute if TAFE.

By displaying previously unseen sketchbooks from the last decade, this exhibition shows another side of Pearce’s art-making and provides a unique opportunity for viewers to gain insight into Pearce’s artistic practice and the creative processes involved in the development of his artworks. Art, for Ray Pearce, is all-consuming, he is rarely seen without a sketchbook in hand.

These books contain a myriad of images, doodles, quick sketches, as well as more considered drawings and paintings. In many ways these books offer a more personal view of Pearce’s art practice – we see works which have not been carefully selected and some that perhaps were never intended to be seen by eyes other than those of the artist.

Pearce’s self-confessed preoccupation is time: ‘Time still to make art. Stillness in the work captures time. Time stands still while I work.’ The sketchbooks are representative of differing understandings of time – filled with quick sketches, completed in just a few minutes, yet filling the books themselves has taken Pearce many years. The sketches come to symbolise brief episodes in a much longer story, that of the artist’s life. [Gallery media, ]