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Russell Craig's recent exhibition of Works on Paper explored, primarily, the construction and the dissolution of the hand-made mark. The theme of dissolution was particularly evident in Space Plentitude's large inner room which Craig transformed into a tomb-like space exhibiting his own drawings along with ceramic forms built in collaboration with Brisbane ceramicist Scott Avery, and Craig's four year old son, Eugene.
The visual path the viewer was asked to follow to and from this internal tomb reinforced the metaphors of life and death which arose out of the artist's play with the mark-making process. As one moved towards the installation room one passed through colour laser copy images. This seemed indicative of the liveliness of new media, as opposed to the older, even ancient, crafts evident in the inner room. However, it is not that Craig wished to praise the new possibilities of technological media, but rather to foreground the omnipresence of the primitive human mark in all stages of the evolution of Western visual discourse.
In the inner, 'tomb-like' room, the installation set in opposition the visual discourses of the Western classical and the non-Western cultures. Two series of drawings, in black conté on off-white paper, were placed directly opposite each other along the long walls of the room. One series used expressionistic gestures to depict stylised masks of African culture whilst the other used the conventions of the Western Classical style to present the commonly known visual forms of our own culture, particularly the classical bust. Although Craig used a variety of marks to build the illusion of form and volume in these drawings, I found that they gained strength through his use of the mark within