Ruth O’Leary - Feeling Drawing Thinking (2024)

Ruth O’Leary - Feeling Drawing Thinking - 2024

Ruth O’Leary’s Feeling Drawing Thinking positions drawing as a direct channel between thought and sensation. The exhibition frames drawing not as a secondary or preparatory act but rather as a primary site of inquiry: “to feel is to think and to think is to feel.” Her watercolour work embodies this by folding emotional states into mark-making that is both delicate and raw.

What I find striking is the emphasis on immediacy. These drawings feel less like polished objects and more like traces of lived experience, materialising what Rosalind Krauss once described as “the index” which is a mark that testifies to presence and process. O’Leary’s practice collapses the distinction between private feeling and public artwork and serves as a reminder that drawing can carry the weight of both intimacy and communication.

This resonates with my own work, in the mix of media choices and the overlap of drawn content and typography, and I connect with O’Leary’s approach to drawing as a mode of translation for complex interior states, particulary those which are negative, traumatic and stressful.

Feeling Drawing Thinking reframes drawing as a thinking tool, but also as an affective one. It encourages me to consider how my own marks (whether stitched, beaded, or painted) might serve as indices of feeling as much as representations of narrative.