This is "A Fragile Structure", completed in September.
Returning at last to my long-standing interest in the disused railway line to Amlwch, on Anglesey, this pencil drawing returns to an idea I first had way back in 2019 but could not resolve. Well, it's taken me four years, but here it is at last. Many 6Bs gave their all for this piece.
My intention was to achieve a more organic treatment of the line of the railway line. I was thinking at first of the idea of "branch lines" and imagined I could achieve something tree-like: ever smaller branches sprouting from branches and so forth. In pursuit of that, I also included in my thinking, for the first time, the long-gone sub-branchline which ran from Pentreberw to Benllech/Red Wharf Bay. (The shorter "branch" running towards but not reaching the top right of the drawing.) It closed in 1930 and there is very little trace of it today.
The drawing takes information from the Ordnance Survey Landranger map of Anglesey. I imagined an accumulation of journeys taken by people on these railways lines: somebody travels from Amlwch to Llangefni to visit a friend, for example, or from Llangwyllog to Amlwch to see the sea. The railway lines enable but don't complete the journeys, of course. You have a walk, or somesuch, to and from the railways stations. I created enough of these to form a cumulative network or structure of interlocked imaginary journeys within which the railway lines form only the “trunks of the tree”.
The drawing is made by placing the tip of a nail into a nibholder and inscribing lines into the surface of the paper, rather in the manner of cutting a groove into a vinyl record. For me this feels like a process of setting down memories, just like the process of “cutting” a record with the information needed to produce the music recorded into its surface. I then went over it with a soft pencil to highlight the groove and make it visible as negative space. This is a process I have used before, though not in the context of the Amlwch railway line.
Detail from “A Fragile Structure”. Copyright Mark Clay 2023.
What emerged was decidedly untreelike, but it was still organic and extremely fragile. If anything, it seemed to me as I worked, it was more like the growth of lichen or even the structures of coral.
Coral grows when tiny, fragile creatures create a solid structure (calcium carbonate) around themselves to protect themselves. And it seemed to me that I was doing something similar with the "wrapping" of graphite that I was surrounding my grooved journeys with. In this way, the drawing becomes something about the fragility of memory, and gestures towards an attempt to preserve (save) it: since the Amlwch line stopped carrying passengers in the 1960s, those real journeys along the line are now passing out of living memory.
I also wanted to give this piece a ground, so that it appeared rooted or anchored. Just as a coral reef is anchored on bedrock, the Amlwch line is rooted on the (still operating) railway from Bangor to Holyhead. The profile of the solid graphite ground shows its path but also provides a strong contrast to the fragile network of the lines that radiate outwards from it.
For me, this typifies the potential of processual drawing. I have spoken and written before about how the process teaches me something and helps me to resolve and understand what you are doing, sometimes a distance away from what I originally envisaged. For me it is really valuable to be responsive to that inherent quality of drawing.