LONQUISTS’ BACK ROOM DRAWINGS

‘Lonquists’ back room drawings’ are a set of frottage rubbings taken from the interior panels cladding the demolished1960s rear sleep-out of a pre-war suburban weatherboard home.

The Lonquists’ sleep-out or ‘back room’ expresses the Australian dream reality of improvised built in verandahs as the family outgrows the home. The Lonquists inhabited their house from the mid 1950s to the late 1990s. The room layers of paint pentimenti speak of multiple refreshing paint jobs, a process of accumulating erasures. A palimpsest of pasts and futures (examined pasts and hopeful futures).

Each drawing is worked on a horizontal table with a thin Japanese paper placed over the room panel like a sheet. The drawing action itself is a soft scumbling process using slightly different hues and grades of graphite blocks My hand grazes across the surface using touch to find the surface. in a range of emphasising small whorls, large sweeps, stipples and parallel hatches. I gently apply mediating pressure and touch to reveal the subtle textures of the surface grain, ridges of framing and ornamental strapping, and traces of paint layers, scratches and indents, soft and hard edges, perforations and breaks, water-damage and grime. I make multiple ‘passes’ over each drawing, accumulating and revealing blooming impressions formed from each panel’s varied conditions of decay and rot; a brittle, feathered and fragile materiality.

The set of drawings are installed hanging vertically, aligning with the orientation and sequencing of the original room. Together they form a continuous passage of an alternative wall over the gallery wall. They manifest the presence of one place into another. The viewer transits across the drawing sheets in a one-to-one scale relation to place. Sight becomes a calibration of touch. In a sense the viewer is situated in place of a composite of an inhabitant and the artist, a participant in the undoing and redoing of space.

The touch of architecture calibrates a slow material transition over 50 years, the relinking of panel fragments. Frottage can be seen as drawing the surface back up through paper - like a recovery of memory and human absence.Each drawing reveals a history of decisions, adjustments and accidents and damage in situ about the interior, capturing a vernacular of sorts. Ideas of gendered adjustments inherent in domestic home-making.

Carolyn Eskdale. Lonquists' back room drawings (South Wall 12-9, West wall 8-7, North Wall 6-3, East Wall 2-1) 2024. Graphite on paper, each 228 x 97.5 cm. Photography: Christian Capurro.

Carolyn Eskdale. Lonquists' back room drawings (details). Photography: Christian Capurro.