Ellen Wetmore – “Venus in the Halls of Justice”, 2021, 48 cm x 61cm, unframed, acrylic and ink on paper – I marble my own paper with liquid acrylic and methyl cellulose. I make “Turkish Stone” style paper that looks like a cut slab of marble. The paper dictates to me the images I will draw. I work directly in archival, waterproof ink, without pencils or planning. It’s a discovery process because I’m not sure what will come next. The rules of this process are that I must draw the first thing I see. This is like cloud spotting. Strange images emerge side by side: mushrooms with eyes, a skull bearing an elephant in its mouth, an ant wearing a miniature gazebo and enormous daisies. These move to the visual vocabularies of art history, comics, the natural world and world news. I develop narrative as I go and sometimes nudge the drawing along those lines. I enjoy the way drawing can change time and our notions of space along every line. https://vimeo.com/ellenwetmore https://www.instagram.com/ellen.wetmore/