From the 'Bridge Road Projects' blog 2007:

ANDREW ATCHISON
ISLAND DRAWING
TCB art inc. June 6 - ? 2007
Review by Alex Martinis Roe

Feedback, Static and the Malfunctioning TARDIS

Andrew Atchison’s Island Drawing does some new work with the artform of drawing and self-reflexively gives us a four dimensional discussion of drawing as content. This Island Drawing is a map of Atchison’s spatial experience and memory of an island he visited on holiday. Multi-media elements cluster on the floor, forming an island to contemplate from a distant shore. On an island of pot plant vegetation, two wood veneer monitors sit facing away from each other. Each displays a low-fi video of the island landscape.

LINE: The 1st Dimension: Drawing as diagramatic

Drawing can be seen as similar to mapping. Rather than being defined by a use of materials, it is perhaps more interesting to look at drawing practice as that of notation. Mark making in response to sensory perception is the traditional model of what constitutes drawing as a particular domain of artistic research. Atchison adapts this idea of mark making in order to frame his investigation within ‘drawing language’. The resulting notations of his spatial/temporal understanding have an immediacy that is distinctly intuitive. Although observational, this drawing has no claims to objective representation. The video elements clearly position us behind the eye of the artist. The movement of the camera follows the orientation of the artist’s body. One of the Nature Videos is not only a notation: it describes the artist’s body exploring the island’s geography. The isolation of the landform enforces a cyclical exploration of its shores. One always ends up at the same point of beginning. Atchison stands at the centre of the island and turns 360 degrees holding the camera at eye height. The video loops continuously so there is no narrative beginning or end to the island’s perimeter. This could be seen as an extension on the idea that drawing reflects the world, pointing out that drawing and what it describes are always engaged in an inseparable feedback.

SHAPE: The 2nd Dimension: Drawing methodologies as content

On the wall there is what Atchison calls a TV drawing of the island. Wood veneer contact covers a foamcore ‘TV’ and inside is a drawing of the Island surrounded by mirrors reflecting the image endlessly within this small space. The edge of the drawing repeated recalls the division of the night sky in a star chart format. Little stars drawn around the island deepen the sense of there being a planetarium within the TV. This drawing inside the TV is made using a well-known formula. Atchison revives the primary school art project where you colour paper in rainbow crayons, paint it black and then scratch out a multicoloured line drawing. The TV drawing gives us this formula as stars waiting to be illuminated out of a night sky. Recalling a magical moment in childhood, this drawing immortalises the memory of the island holiday as a new celestial body. The stars are like dots and the island a new join-the-dots constellation. Here is the new TV Zodiac!

DEPTH: The 3rd Dimension: Drawing as memory.

TV Drawing is a discussion of TV broadcasting as a notational drawing practice and also a site of collective memory. Are our memories framed like TV programs and vice versa? Memories play in our heads on a loop: always the same snippet. Repeating out of context they distort becoming our own immortalised fables. TV can be seen as our culture’s production of its own distorted memory. What happened yesterday is broadcast today via a reductive snippet: framed, partial, discoloured/hypercoloured. The island is foregrounded via the loop and the star constellation as an isolated realm. The rugged landscape and blustering audio track of the wind is hauntingly different to our colonised holiday locations. This uncanny otherworld that Atchison has drawn is parallel to the de-contextualised realm of memory.

TIME: The 4th Dimension: A new appreciation of the static as temporal.

‘A homemade TV work, for gazing at but without sound or movement.’[1]
Atchison’s drawings give us insight into notational practices (whether that be drawing, television or memories of a summer holiday) as a kind of TARDIS.[2] Like Doctor Who’s vehicle for space/time exploration Atchison’s wood veneer TV is malfunctioning. It begs that we look deeper into the static and find a new constellation of stars in a formation which recalls our island of looped memories.
Alex Martinis Roe 2007

[1] Artist’s statement
[2] The TARDIS is a time machine and spaceship in the BBC’s ‘Doctor Who’. It is an acronym for ‘Time and Relative Dimensions in Space’ (which coincidently sounds like a futurist description of drawing). One can be transported to any point in time and space on board the TARDIS. Its interior is much larger than its exterior, which can blend in with its environment. Doctor Who’s TARDIS was a damaged and stolen model which suffered from malfunctions.