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Drew Bickford’s latest exhibition is a gruesome, sensuous trip through the squishy waste products of meatworks, laboratories and of course, the artist’s studio. Contorted, shifting creatures that seem to have escaped the nightmarish dreamscapes of James Gleeson or Hieronymus Bosch, settle on paper through Bickford’s able drawing.
Bickford’s visual flights of fancy are aided and abetted by selections of text, a recurring motif in the artist’s work for some time, although of late they have become more fragmented and abstract, tempering the intricate detail of mutant forms, hard angles and curves, with dark deposits of ink. The text itself provides visual cues for the images, and each work corresponds with the name of a real place. This allows Bickford’s phantasmagoria an anchor to the real world, a somewhat unnerving prospect. Hand writing and lettering is a part of drawing, of course, and the way these words are becoming slowly incorporated into the compositional whole takes our clues away, one by one, swallowed by the drawings’ frightening forms.
Bickford’s work uncovers something universal, a kind of body horror that everybody experiences from time to time. As beautiful as somebody may be, inside we are all made up of the same components. Sacks of guts and blood and meat. Look at any images of the horrific massacres and genocides of war, and the shocking truth is made evident; we are made up of a putrid, base matter, which cannot be disguised in the latest fashion, scents or surgery. Death is the great equaliser, uncompromising and inevitable. Perhaps the horrors of Bickford’s works are not so much an outward projection of his own tortured or tragicomic soul, but a reflection of our own