NICOLA BAILEY | Between Dog and Wolf / Entrée Chien et Loup

When we watch animals dream, we guess at the mysteries of the consciousness that must exist because it is eking out at every fluttered lid. In turn, in the dreamscape, we approach the edges of our own consciousness, guessing at its mysteries. As Bailey puts it, “The opaque and intangible nature of animals dreaming reaffirms our sameness; there is no other.”

Baileys painting style supports this point. Figures, both human and canine—as well as their downy surrounds—are outlined in a loose, tender charcoal: a drawing. To quote Berger from “Drawing is discovery”:

A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it. Each confirmation or denial brings you closer to the object, until finally you are, as it were, inside it: the contours you have drawn no longer marking the edge of what you have seen but the edge of what you have become.

In drawing them, Bailey communes with her dogs. She wonders about them. What do they think about? How do they feel? How might they want to be represented? We might say that, in the act of drawing, Bailey collaborates with her subjects; she reaches the edge of what she has become in the act of observing them.

To request the exhibition catalogue, please contact gallery@everard.co.za