Drawn Waters (Borrowdale)

Drawn Waters (Borrowdale) (natural and machined graphic on steel armature)

The image above puts something which is apparently (I've not seen it in real life) beautiful and mimetic of the natural world into the most antiseptic, frigid environment imaginable. The second example below serves the work much better - a quasi-industrial environment nods in the direction of the mining of graphite which the work references with Borrowdale. The fact that she constructs her own works in design and in the space, for me, positions her as a worker-artist, perhaps why she was attracted to such a culturally and historically distant place as the Borrowdale graphite mine.

Teresita Fernandez has made objects that could legitimately be called 3D-drawings, but perhaps it's just as well I can't go to galleries very easily these days, since the temptation to help oneself to such an abundance of graphite would be hard to resist.

TERESITA FERNANDEZDrawn Waters (Borrowdale) 2, 2009 natural and machined graphite on steel armature 121.19 x 43.5 x 86 inches 307.8 x 110.5 x 218.4cm

In Drawn Waters (Borrowdale), precision-machined, polished panels of graphite and massive fragments of the raw, mined material are assembled to create a large-scale sculpture of an undulating, dissolving waterfall. Alluding to Leonardo da Vinci's studies of moving water as well as to Robert Smithson's land pours, Fernández turns the idea of a drawing into tangible form, making a solid sculpture that is in effect a three-dimensional gestural graphite drawing, a line dragged through the gallery space. For Fernández, to assemble the sculpture is to engage in the act of drawing.