Credit: STEPHEN LACEY GALLERY

Prints and imprints

Chris Drury's “Journeys on Paper”

Chris Drury's “Journeys on Paper” are on view at the Stephen Lacey Gallery, One Crawford Passage, London EC1 3DP, until 7 July.

Some scientific observers of nature seem naturally drawn to complex phenomena, reaching out to grasp the elusive patterns underlying such fluctuating systems as populations of predators in relation to prey, or the beguiling chaos of fluids in turbulent motion. Others are attracted to the potential certainties of ‘mathematical’ engineering, in which the goal is to define the smallest functional units as components in the reconstruction of effects from causes. Temperament is clearly a powerful factor in determining who chooses which path.

Artists who aspire to reconstitute nature in their work — without necessarily imitating natural appearance — also tend to gravitate towards one of these two poles. Among the British predecessors of Chris Drury as students of landscape, Ben Nicholson's geometricizing reliefs and drawings, undertaken in St Ives between the two world wars, leant towards the mathematical pole, while Ivon Hitchen's contemporary oil paintings exploited free sweeps of overlaid paint to evoke the elusive contingencies of light, colour, atmosphere, reflection and motion in the moist English landscape.

Chris Drury's prime interest is the complexity of natural forces in action. Yet, like a number of recent artists who involve themselves in process rather than direct portrayal, he is drawn to the way in which the inherent structures in dynamic systems result in orders to which we can instinctively respond — even without benefit of the new mathematics of complexity.

Drury has worked extensively in nature itself, using natural materials to construct land sculpture and ‘cloud chambers’ (stone ‘hives’, which enclose camera obscura images of moving skies). His works on paper — or rather using paper as a surface to be manipulated — range widely across phenomena in which he senses patterns of affinity. Swirling folds in driftwood trunks of redwood are reminiscent of vortex configurations in a cross-section of tissues in the human heart. Caps of different mushrooms deposit their spore prints in a minute tracery of radiating geometry that is at once regular and infinitely variable.

Yet there is something more at work than ‘nature art’. Maps, those most conventional plottings of the surface of the Earth, are interwoven, basket-wise. A map of the Ladakh desert, for instance, is interwoven, strip by strip, with paper rubbed with desert earth to form a shallow bowl, which is in turn recessed within a rubbing from a prayer stone encountered en route. Maps are peppered with words. The nucleus of a spore print is typically surrounded by minutely inscribed names, phrases and clauses in a radial pattern that marvellously echoes the deposits from the interstices of the gills. In Poison Pie (pictured) the white spore print of Amanita muscaria (Fly Agaric) extends in an aureole of text that chants the names of poisonous fungi — Amanita phalloides (Death Cap), Amanita virosa (Destroying Angel), Russula emetica (The Sickener), Coprinus atramentarius (Ink Cap), Hebeloma crustuliniforme (Poison Pie itself), and so on — in concert with cool accounts of their identification and toxicity.

Drury patiently interweaves natural images and mental imprints in a constant give and take between the business of observation, acts of naming and recording, means of visual plotting, processes of classifying, evocative associations, inscribed memories, and the kinds of spiritual strivings that have accompanied so many cultures in their quest to become one with nature. As Marina Wallace says in her catalogue essay, “Drury accesses the scientific classifications and attempts to turn them into almost mythological narratives, using the element of repetition to accompany the visual marks”. The result is an endlessly suggestive immersion in our visual and conceptual relationship with nature, in the orders we can discern and the contingencies in which we find such human delight.