Michael Quane RHA & Johanna Connor Paper - Pencil - Chisel - Stone

Michael Quane RHA & Johanna Connor 

Paper - Pencil - Chisel - Stone  is a joint exhibition by Michael Quane RHA and Johanna Connor, drawing on the artists respective media of stone and paper.  

Connor’s drawings on paper are made as if looking through a lens, editing the visible and the invisible and striving to extract some of the hidden magic from the mundane. Quane on the other hand incessantly and meditatively scrapes through the act of carving stone, a ‘loose and flabby’ boulder ever tightening with each pass of the chisel and emerging into a deliberate form.  

O’Connor seeks beauty in what appears to be ordinary scenes and sets about to reveal this beauty through the process of drawing. The artist loses herself in a thicket of meaning derived from the traces of peoples’ endeavours that have left an impression in the landscape. Her landscape is the landscape of things and traces, where furrows drawn deep remain in the tilth of the soil, where the hollow in a horizon holds a story, where the vast scale of husbandry in the land reveals a scale of means, where the proportions of subjects can express an aesthetic that is personal, communal or indeed global, where characteristics can reveal the architecture of social and cultural evolution, where assumptions find us caught in the wire of nostalgia, where the ground has the indelible, yet faintest, footprint impressed upon its surface. Titles emerge whilst drawing or sometimes in discussion with Quane. 

The principal material onto which Quane draws is stone. The chisel tears into the surface, scraping white abrasions into black stone, in the act of gathering the form into itself. Each mark serves a purpose but isn’t cherished for its own sake. Its value to the whole is equal to how long it lasts before another scrape of the chisel obliterates it; that mark in turn to be supplanted by subsequent marks and scrapes. Hundreds of thousands of these serve to gather up the form from the boulder. The marks fold a drawing’s surface into itself where it needs to be tucked and wrap it ever tighter, until a stage is reached where the drawn surface stretches into a form. Fragments of a drawing remain proud of the form, having the appearance of a lesion on the surface, through which the subjacent quality of the rock can be seen. He is intent on immediacy and spontaneity and hence the drawings he produces are part of the process of direct carving.  

Michael Quane and Johanna Connor are based in Coachford, County Cork where they share ‘2 Studios: One Gallery’.

Image: Michael Quane, All Our Belongings, 2025, Nabresina-Light Limestone, 52 x 42 x 30 cm