Exhibition Launch | Recent Diagrams and Proposals: Duncan Ross

Recent Diagrams and Proposals is an exhibition of printed drawings and wooden sculptural assemblages. The assemblages are produced from materials gathered in public spaces including an anarchist-run community park in North Belfast. The prints reproduce a series of pen and ink sketches made using a range of graphic techniques including esquisse, automatic drawing and technical draughting. Amongst other themes, these incorporate the artist’s interest in neurological routine, geomancy and box art.

The exhibition space in this instance is regarded as an interface between self and institution, solitude and community. The exhibition title, Recent Diagrams and Proposals, invites a reading of the installation as a precursor to future arrangements of space, time and resources. Considered as ‘diagrams’ the artworks are suggestive of pathways through a problem, both depictions of, and potential solutions to, some kind of impasse. In this sense, the artist has been influenced by a range of participatory cultures that have developed communitarian and artistic methods of resisting estrangement. However, although the works mobilise an aesthetics of escapism, they resist nostalgia. All are future seeking whilst acknowledging failure, at once deferrals of action and spaces of emergence.

Duncan has lived in Belfast since November 2000. During that time, his practice has centred on an exploration of draughtsmanship and visual arts facilitation, where he has developed distinct bodies of work over extended durations. Examples include illustrations for The Vacuum newssheet (2003 – 2014), the artist’s organisation of a weekly open-access public art workshop called The Tuesday Drawing Studio (2013 - 2018), and Skull, a long-form live drawing event held monthly at the Black Box since 2016.