John Court 'The work between the lines'

In The work between the lines, John Court’s first UK solo exhibition, new works will be shown alongside drawings and performances produced over the last fifteen years. His output includes performance, sculpture and video, but he considers all his work to be fundamentally concerned with drawing, in that drawing connects the elements of line, movement, space and time.

Court is severely dyslexic. He began drawing at the age of nineteen, using it as a means to comprehend and come to terms with the difficulties and negative experiences he had gone through at school. During this process he gained self-confidence through learning to read and write in his own way. The theme of control interests him, where the act of writing becomes an encounter with (dis)empowerment.

In the drawings series A Blank White Page, it is difficult to decipher the hand of the artist, his involvement is almost devoid and hidden from view. In some instances his works look as if they have been made by a machine, possessing a reductivist quality and a sense of purity. However, in reality as with all his works, they explore time, slowness, attention to detail and precision. The exploration of time is employed in the process, with drawings taking months to create.

The exhibition will also include a series of films and documentary footage from performances and trace material. One notable example is The Impossibility of the Word. This series of videos sees the artist develop a contorted display of incomprehensible words. An attempt to come to terms with his inability to comprehend writing as a cognitive process conducted according to prescriptive rules of grammar, punctuation and syntax, usually applied without conscious effort.

Spacex has commissioned a new performance work by Court to mark the end of the exhibition.

For more information visit http://spacex.org.uk/exhibitions/john-court/