Kathy Prendergast

Prendergast's city drawings create a sense of spreading one that seems never ending, like a bacteria. The drawings are highly detailed, yet lightly sketched with pencil. I am interested in the grids, subtlety of detail and the form that emerges through this process of drawing. This obsessive interest in mapping, creating a longing, belonging and a nations identity continue to take place.

"City Drawings is to articulate a sense of displacement.  Even as the eyes wander over the streets that one knows and identifies with as one’s own, the lines signifying the streets are too removed from the familiar.  This alignment with the familiar creates the most successful art of the grotesque, because the viewer feels drawn in by the comfort of the familiar, only to become disoriented, confused and ultimately repelled by the constant feeling of “out-of-placeness”.

Inside the gallery, surrounded only by the City Drawings, a sense of nausea occurs as the excess of the miniscule criss-crossing and swerving streets, page after page, cause each place to become almost indistinguishable, to the point of becoming placeless.  The work, as a result, creates for the viewer the feeling of eternal displacement, when one is uprooted from the place one has always known to a new and unfamiliar place with which one cannot easily identify or feel a sense of belonging.  Due to the anonymity of the piece, the artist cannot be located or placed within the piece, no more so than viewers can place themselves.

The work then operates in the mode of disgust as it impinges spatially on the viewer’s sense of self and subjectivity. “The disgusting unfolds its affective power in the context of the aesthetic.” Boundaries are endlessly open and fluid in the work of Prendergast, allowing the flow between locales in City Drawings, but also between nature, science and art.  Thus the skin of the world is re-ordered and the new spatial re-organization ensures that hierarchy is disregarded."

This critic of Prendergast's work was written by Shellie Dickson (2010) in the article City Drawings as a Spatial Grotesque. The article reveals that although these drawings are visually pleasing they can also lead to disorientation and an overwhelming sensation of detail. I see her work a scope for new beginning. There are no tiles in these citys no names for the streets so it is left for the viewer to interpret the work and capture a memory of their past.