Making Mountains out of__________ 2023

A performative drawing which reacts to restriction of space and physical movement. This work comments on the value of artistic labour, production, failure and achievement. 

Making mountains out of ______________ is a response in time to a reading of Algerian French philosopher Albert Camus’s essay, The Myth of Sisyphus through charcoal drawn movement; rolling and scraping, monotonous and repetitive in a reflection of Sisyphus’s futile labour; where he must repeatedly roll a boulder up a mountain, only to watch it roll down again. I constructed a drawing through these restricted movements, rolling charcoal and mapping out imagined paths of both Sisyphus and his rock, becoming a moving part of the composition myself within the drawing plane.

This work adopts Camus’s absurdist views (which he applies to the Greek myth), of neither giving in to circumstantial disappointment or trying to escape from failure, persevering, nevertheless.

The completed drawing resembles mountainous plains.