Patrick Cockram uses drawing as a means to both analyse and involve the architecture of the space in which the works are installed. His drawings call attention to the particular characteristics of the space: its dimensions, its features and how people move through it.

While he favours conventional drawing materials such as charcoal, graphite powder and paper, rather than making a drawing of something (figure on ground), Cockram’s approach is to fuse material, process, concept and artefact (figure as ground). His monochrome palette of greys and blacks sharply contrasts with the white walls of the gallery. Working at the interstices of drawing and sculpture he notes that ‘as black is deemed to have the greatest mass of all colours, it gives my drawing a sense of weight’.

The title of the collection of works that he has made in response to the architecture of the Project Space is Rectangular. He identifies the rectangle as one of the most basic representations of spatial containment and uses it to ‘explore the various ways in which the relationship between line and space can be manipulated, blurring the parameters between the 2- and 3-dimensional object’. A line drawing, made directly onto the gallery wall, echoes the contours of the architecture, creating the illusion of a space-within-a-space. In another work he extends the illusionistic qualities of drawing to more physical experiences of weight, mass and balance: This takes the form of a somewhat precarious stack of blocks, made from a seemingly dense, graphite-impregnated paper. The tower looms over the viewer, demanding that they give full attention to both the drawing-object and the relationship of their own body to the surrounding space.

Patrick Cockram (b. 1990) studied for a BTEC National Diploma in Fine Art at Canterbury College (2008 – 2010) and graduated last summer with a BA Hons in Mixed Media Fine Art from the University of Westminster (2010 -2013). His work has been exhibited in a number of group shows in London that include: 51, Ambika P3 (2013); Machine, 5th Base Gallery (2013); and Silver Bond, London Gallery West (2012). His solo, one-off public performance titled See the Control took place outside the National Gallery in 2011.

Text by Tessa Peters

All images Patrick Cockram, installation view of 'Rectangular' (2014) at Marsden Woo Project Space, image © Philip Sayer, courtesy of Marsden Woo Gallery, London