DRAWING OUT DISPLACEMENT

In her essay, Drawing Out Displacement, published in the Review and Record of Arab Culture and Arts (Vol.10, 2004) Catherine Hamel asks her own personal displacement from Beirut to expose itself and to engage her in the act of drawing. 

In parallel to the production of this essay, Hamel was producing images as forerunners to and predecessors of her words. Hamel writes:

"The drawings are tied by their technique which experiments with the reduction and erasure of accurately drawn lines. They are reflective pieces used as generators of text, as a way of thinking that allows the line of drawing to search before thought is restricted by words."

The drawings include:

1. Mythologiesillustrates a selection of tales of ancient Gods and Heroes.
2. Dürer Revisitedisolates delicate details of Albrecht Dürer engraving “Knight, Death and Devil” and uses them as points of departure to reinterpret their larger context.
3. Captive studies of human fragility in the face of freedom

Christine Sowiak, curator of the Nickle Arts Museum writes that Hamel's Drawings 'move away from the precision of words to the insight of the language of drawing - to an expansive perspective that enters the conceptual realm of metaphor.'