National Drawing Day: 'Mud' by Molly McFadden

For National Drawing Day this year on Saturday 15 May 2021, CCA Derry~Londonderry hosts artist Molly McFaddens’s Mud.

Molly’s practice uses drawing and painting to reflect on the ways in which the shape of an absent conflict occupies the psychic landscape of the North. City based Molly says her work is less immediately concerned with the violence of the past but instead intends to look, however indirectly, at the sombre realities of our environment by re-contextualising the silent objects and spaces we ritualistically interact with.

For Drawing Day 2021 Molly shares her own process with the audience, by introducing the ways in which poetry intersects with her own work. The audience is invited to give a visual response to the poem Wandering by Eva H.D. Molly describes how she is drawn to the quietude in this collection, that the poems record a flux between grounding, objective observation and muddied withdrawals into oneself, and how one colours the other. “That way of looking resonates with me; that bleed of the external into interior reflection, and vice versa, is something that I try to communicate in my own work.”

Molly, keen to see how others will respond to the task, invites a visual response from the audience.

Drawing materials will be available to pick up on Tuesday 11 May 10am – 5.00pm and Saturday 15 May from 10am at the front door of the gallery at 10–12 Artillery Street, Derry~Londonderry. There are 25 packs available. Please wear a mask, keep a 2 metre distance from others.

If you are not local to the gallery you can still join in with your own drawing materials and if you don’t have anything respond with what you can find: be creative!