7 Arctic Pebbles

My husband Chris Wainwright, brought me 7 pebbles back from his first Arctic visit to Disko Bay, Greenland with Cape Farewell in 2008. I used these small white pebbles as the basis for a series of 7 drawings made by suspending a pen from the hold of my ship MB Rock moored on the River Thames.

I placed one of these chalk pebbles in the centre of the paper with the gel pen still suspended, and set the drawing going. The pebble inevitably disrupted the flow of the pen, like the disruption of the flow in the river around the hull of the ship. The line around the pebble created a drawn boundary, or edge, an inside and an outside. When the drawing was complete, usually a durational, or sometimes an aesthetic decision, I removed the pebble leaving a space of remembering – already an absent presence. This felt poignant as it seemed to represent my own invisible presence, implied but not visible. 

Sometimes the movement was so violent it knocked the chalk pebble completely off the paper leaving virtually no trace that it had once been there at all.