TOM FITZGERALD — The Ministry of Dust Drawings

intro by Jim Savage

ISBN 978 0948037 115    32pages (paperback)    24x17cm    23 illus

This volume of drawings was published to coincide with The Ministry of Dust touring exhibition of the artist's work at Limerick City Gallery of Art.

EXTRACT

"Perhaps these drawings are like letters. Or maybe, they are like the pages of a diary or a personal journal. They have a sense of being at once public and private, visible but also secret. When you look at them you don’t imaginatively go into their space in the physical sense of space; rather you are drawn into their flow of puzzling thoughts, their stream of strange ideas eavesdropping on the artist dreaming. (The artist dreaming was a description Goya gave of his Capricho drawings, and perhaps its echo is not inappropriate.)
          These are beautifully careful drawings which in some strange and surprising ways open themselves up to the world we experience and let it in. They orbit around their titles, which is where (apparently) they begin. They are concerned with the visual only insofar as it also carries a thought. Rather than just looked at, they have to be interpreted and decoded: they have to be read. They clearly depict somewhere, but also a somewhere else that parallels the world we know, that re-presents it to us in what appear to be allegories, pickled in satire and permeated with an uneasy awareness of the possibility of the absurd underlying every human endeavour."

— from the essay by Jim Savage