Sharyn Wortman: Material Drawing: Marlborough
Current exhibition
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In Context: Sharyn Wortman
Text by Anna SouterWorking primarily with large-scale charcoal drawings, Sharyn Wortman’s practice is concerned with opening up and holding a space that is both visual and poetic. Within this space, Wortman’s work asks questions about the relationships between body and landscape, and between spatiality and materiality, to create sites of atmospheric emergence.Taking cues from her daily routine, including daily walks on common land, Wortman collects impressions in her mind before arriving with them at the studio. Allowing her materials to guide her, she finds that landscapes and imaginal spaces begin to emerge during the drawing process. Each work begins as a formative moment of rupture and arrival onto the page, from which the finished drawings are developed over weeks and months, with the artist repeatedly revisiting and working back into each sheet. Textured charcoal dust sits on top of the drawings’ surface as well as being embedded into the weave of the paper, revealing the depth and complexity of the process.Throughout her practice, she seeks out the energetics of mark-making, where the drawing becomes witness to the motion of the artist’s hand, which often appears as an active participant in the works through prints or finger-marks. In this way, each drawing acts as a performative archive of an event. As Wortman puts it, drawing becomes a recording machine for time.In this formulation, art can be seen as a process of reconfiguring and manipulating the materials available to hand. This can be a means of understanding the world as a place in which at a fundamental level everything is forged from the same matter; we are all made of stardust. Here, as elsewhere in Wortman’s work, the material and the poetic are not placed in opposition to each other, but appear as part of the same continuum. Her lyrical titles express a sense of the mysterious, of realms hidden in plain sight.In her series of smaller drawings on found roofing slates, From the Ashes of Stars, she uses pastel, chalk, and charcoal to accentuate incidental scratches and imperfections. Her technique allows hazy landscapes to materialise, bringing out the textures and the forms that are intrinsic to the material. Each work is unique, but uniformity of format and media fosters the generative potential of iteration. There is a link to the chalkboards of historic classrooms: places for inscription, learning, and erasure, where the erasure never completely removes all traces of its past.Tracing an art historical lineage that encompasses Whistler’s Nocturnes, Turner’s atmospheric environments, and Constable’s cloud paintings, as well as the gestural work of Cy Twombly and Tacita Dean, Wortman’s drawings hold space that is open to experimentation with no fixed relationship to time. This space acts as a container for emotions, exerting a force to hold back the demands of the world, even as it asserts itself as an active participant in that world. -
Photo credit: Elizabeth Logan Harris
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Works
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Sharyn Wortman, A Place That Only Exists In The Moonlight, 2025£ 5,950.00
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Sharyn Wortman, Notations On Spring, 2025
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Sharyn Wortman, Cast Upon The Rocks, 2025£ 1,650.00
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Sharyn Wortman, Cold Winters, Fogged Glass, 2025£ 1,650.00
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Sharyn Wortman, Notations On Spring - Study, 2025£ 1,650.00
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Sharyn Wortman, Grace Was Lost To Thunder, 2025£ 1,650.00
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Sharyn Wortman, From The Ashes Of Stars II, 2025£ 1,250.00
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Sharyn Wortman, From The Ashes Of Stars III, 2025£ 1,250.00
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