But Who Tried Without Success

Simon Lewty makes drawings which bring together image and text. He builds up a drawing by staining and incising paper, and then adding translucent tissue layers each carrying parts of the composition. The process is intuitive and somewhat unpredictable. Words and mysterious motifs embedded in the paper combine to create a dense personal narrative that functions like a map of the artist’s unconscious mind. Many of the motifs – dotted lines, arrows and so on – look very much like the lines on a real map. Each of the drawings takes its title from a disembodied fragment of the text – in this case, the words ‘But who tried without success’, suggesting an elusive thought or a dream only partly grasped.