Nina Mae Fowler, Bette, 2018
For the inaugural display at Draw Art Fair 2019, Cob presents three artists; Sam Austen, Nina Mae Fowler and Cat Roissetter, comparing dialogues between moving and drawn image and sculptural or composite approaches to the medium - all the while typified by their own brands of unnerving psychological intensity.
Early animated cinema and science fiction are particular influences on video works by Sam Austen (b. 1986, London). Austen utilises a range of in-camera multi- layered special effects, shooting an array of built objects, material, texts and drawings to establish a threatening and disordered reality, framed by a comic strip humour.
Known for large-scale pencil and graphite drawings that border on the sculptural installation, Nina Mae Fowler (b.1981, London) revels in the sheer visual richness of Hollywood’s Golden Age, whilst taking a cool-headed look at its sometimes lurid inner workings. Steeped in the grotesquery of glamour, Fowler brings a mortician’s scalpel to the immaculate corpse of bygone celebrity culture to resonate with contemporary concerns.
Cat Roissetter’s (b.1984, London) visual language is derived from an intensity of observation that verges on the neurotic and reads between nursery rhyme and nightmare. Roissetter is known for her experiments with material degradation: bleaching, tarnishing and weathering her paper with olive oil and acidic techniques drawn from photography. Her representations are derived from sources as diverse as pornography, Victorian illustration and personal photographs- produced in a multi layered technique using home-made carbon paper as a tool for abstraction.