Hollybush Gardens is pleased to present Cardinal Beams, a solo exhibition of new drawings by Charlie Prodger. Previously known for her work across moving image, sculpture and installation, Prodger began to make drawings during a 2023 residency at Yaddo in upstate New York and at her subsequent year-long Fellowship at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Massachusetts. The first series was exhibited as part of her solo exhibition The Offering Formula at Secession, Vienna (December 2023– February 2024). She writes, ’Every few years, I shift to a new way of working. It hasn’t necessarily been a conscious process, rather it is reflective of my interest in the limits and parameters of particular materials, and in pushing, and feeling out those edges.’1
For Prodger, the action of working manually with a single tool is a response to the pervasive presence of digital technology on her working life. Throughout the drawings, she looks at sequences of light and time, meticulously rendered through multiple layers of coloured pencil. Light is diffused through the wired glass door to a Victorian swimming pool and a secular stained glass window with a coiled rope motif in an early twentieth century Saratoga Springs mansion, at the artist residency Yaddo. A tool bag shines in orbit around the earth as viewed from inside the International Space Station, and a strip of sunlight is thrown momentarily across an aeroplane cabin during a transatlantic flight.
In Denim Telepathy and The Hypno-Domme Speaks, images of eroded bass-relief metopes from the south face of the Parthenon depict muscular struggles. Originally designed to be viewed from far below, they are now suspended in front of renderings of utilitarian Art Deco tiles with floral motifs from the stairwell of the tenement building where Prodger lives, creating a flattening of pictorial space.
Prodger’s ongoing preoccupation with perspective and framing is evident in Arlington, August I and Arlington, August II. These tender, large-scale drawings are constructed as two and three-part compositions influenced partially by Ukiyo-e Japanese woodblock prints, made between the seventeenth and nineteenth century. Prodger’s vertical compositions, reminiscent of film strips, function as narrative devices, unfolding frame-by-frame. The upper sections depict a foreshortened male figure based on a rumoured autoerotic act in the upstairs changing rooms of Arlington Baths in Glasgow, of which Prodger is a member. The organisation of the pictorial plane evokes the experience of standing in a lift ascending with the doors open. Prodger spoke of this method as a form of ‘erotic levitation’ when filming certain sequences in her film SaF05 (2019)’ by moving a drone camera up and down on a vertical axis.
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