Ingleby | Peter Liversidge

As spring finally arrives in Edinburgh we are pleased to present a selection of two distinct but related groups of work by Peter Liversidge in the Feast Room on the first floor at 33 Barony Street.

Peter’s Winter Drawings have always been a key element of his practice. It’s a way of working to which he returns during the last two months, and the first two months, of every year, starting no sooner than November 1st and finishing no later than the last day of February.

He first started to make them over twenty years ago at a time when he was supporting his career with a series of jobs in picture framing workshops. The earliest examples appeared, alongside various small sculptures in wood and card, under the general heading of things I made at work when I should have been working. Although always described by the artist as drawings, they are really collages – with each branch made from a slender slither of black framer’s tape, cut with a surgical scalpel and then delicately placed onto the surface of the paper.

The very first of them were collaged onto on salvaged scraps of card or notebook pages, but having refined the process over the years, they are now always made in pairs on the carefully selected end papers of old books and presented as diptychs. As Peter has noted, in a manner that suggests that there might be some form of self-measuring or autobiographical component to the process: ‘the drawings are imagined representations of trees in their winter state; leaf-less and full of future potential’.

Each pair is titled for their difference, rather than their likeness, citing the disparity between the number of leafless branches on one drawing versus those on the other, almost as if they stand in opposition as well as being paired. The manner of making is methodical and meticulous - one tiny slither of tape painstakingly placed next to the last - so that the tree slowly emerges. Once the tape is applied it cannot be removed without tearing the paper, enforcing a kind of care and precision that the artist has described as ‘having as much control over me, as I have over it.’

Something of the deft touch employed in the making of these collages is shared by a second group of works that combine found materials, with a kind of self-imposed set of rules and restrictions, to find their final form.