English Red Earth
by Charles Darwent, art critic for the Independent on Sunday
It is clear from the start that Onya McCausland’s large-scale Eraesed drawings, English Red Earth, should be seen as a pair, that each relates to the other contrapuntally. Quite how their counterpoint works, though, is a secret the drawings keep to themselves. It isn’t simply a case of formal balance, one work appearing as dark-out-of-light, the other as its light-out-of-dark twin. For the truth is that neither of McCausland’s drawings could exist without the other, literally or metaphorically.

The rectangular marks that build up the English Red Earth drawings clearly echo each other, in terms both of individual form and of the rhythm those forms collectively suggest – a language of repetitions, presences and absences, like an esoteric system of musical notation. But the marks are about absence in another, less obvious way as well. Those on what you might think of as the “positive” half of the pair are the result not of addition but of subtraction, which is to say that they have been made by removing pigment from the laid ground with a rubber. This erased pigment is then transferred to the “negative” drawing, McCausland re-enacting, as exactly as is possible, the syncopations and pauses of the original sheet.

Even this is not the end of English Red Earth’s contrapuntal story, though. As its title suggests, the work’s medium is the famous terra rossa d’inghilterra – an ochre so prized in its day that it is found in the Sistine Chapel decorations. It was also used in the Medieval wall painting programme, long lost, in Gloucester Cathedral. As it happens, the most famous provider of English ochre – the source of the pigment used in both
Gloucester and Rome – was a mine in the Forest of Dean, a few miles from McCausland’s studio in the cathedral close. The artists tracked this down and spent claustrophobic hours digging out the red earth from which pigment is made.

A story, then, of many excavations, multiple erasures. It would be wrong to see the work McCausland has made during her year as artist in residence at Gloucester as simply site-specific; paintings such as those in her Marks series of 2001 already showed a deep concern with subtraction and addition. But it seems clear that the Cathedral’s own history, both as a physical object and as a centre of faith, has fed into McCausland’s interest in
balance.

Medieval symbology was fascinated by interval and pause, a fascination that expresses itself variously in the whirring machine that is a cathedral: in the ratios of arch to non-arch, solid to void; in the rises and falls and silences of plainsong. Beyond this again are the various rubbings-out of Gloucester Cathedral’s history, a church so important that it was, as McCausland says, “stripped like a bone” under Cromwell. Her interest in English ochre was spiked by the tiny traces of polychrome decoration that remain on the building’s walls, survivors of Cromwell’s great iconoclastic effacing. McCausland’s seven-part Erased Drawings series is made from stone dust gathered by hand from the vault over the Cathedral’s north transept, so that the story of organic dissolution is also woven into the images’ narrative.

But there is another, equally important balance being struck in this work, and that is between perfection and imperfection. Whether you choose to see the battle as specifically Christian is up to you, but it expresses itself most clearly in the formal impossibility of McCausland’s project. The rhythms and syncopations of her Erased drawings generate themselves algorithmically, each sequence giving rise to the next, the positive drawing predicating the negative. And yet the logic of the artist’s mind is constantly outfoxed by the illogic of her hand, the imperfections and happy surprises that appear from nowhere in the ratios of mark to non-mark, mute to sound. This seems like a story of defeat, of in-built failure. And yet, of course, it is this same defeat which makes McCausland’s work so deeply human; and that humanity, in the end, is the mark of its success.