BELINDA CADBURY
b. 1939, United KingdomBelinda Cadbury is working consistently in pencil on paper either on small-scale works or huge sheets mounted on to canvas or boards so that they become wall-drawings, she asserts the linear strokes of her infinitely practised hand as the central fixed rhythmic core of a graphic universe.
Breaks and variations that are generated by the careful iterations of simple verticals, crossed lines or diagonal interventions in the compositional structure only take on a life when the drawing is completed and the hand has been withdrawn. Then subtle shifts of linear tonality allow diamond or lozenge shapes to move ever so slightly closer together or further apart, to project from the paper or disappear into it: to suggest moiré patterns or disrupt long verticals so that they become folds in fabric rather than inert textile patterns.
This is a stately dance between disembodied geometries and embodied drawing: remoteness turns out not to be remote; nothing is rote and nothing is exactly duplicated within the decorum of the geometric fields where she has made her home.
Deanna Petherbridge, 2012
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