Red Dust

This is my first series of monumental drawings on wood, and they evolved alongside the making of Places for NOVA, my public commission for LandSec in Victoria. 

The ‘mindscapes’ evoked in them are sourced from fragments of real places, snatched images of somewhere that is or has been. They invite viewers to inhabit and absorb them into their mind’s eye, and in doing so to inform and transform them yet again. 

I like the idea that a by-product of brick, the basic unit of so much of our built environment, can become the base for a drawing: that this real-world material can be used to evoke other worlds which exist only in the mind.

The works exploit the experiential qualities of wood and the powdery luminescence of brick dust, taking a building material and grinding it into a pigment. I find the conceptual unities implied by the process exciting to work with.

Writing of these drawings, Martin Kemp, Professor of Art History at Oxford University has said “Qureshi has created his own uncanny world of apparently ‘real’ things that confound the apparent logics of time, space, scale and material. Through his great technical virtuosity... he presents us with his own special world of unconstrained imaginative potential and invites us to participate on our own terms.”