If the devil’s in the details, Olivia Kemp’s drawings are hellish good. Made using a black pen only (and no pencil sketch beforehand), they present highly detailed landscapes that are sprawled across giant pieces of paper. According to Kemp, a small work can take half a day to complete whereas her largest pieces might take six months or more.
“I draw in order to make sense of landscape but also to construct and re-model it,” writes Kemp on her personal website. “I build worlds and imaginary places that grow out of a need to interpret the sites that I have known, expanding and developing them across a page. This encompasses everything, from the visions of a grand landscape right down to the details of the land, the plants and creatures that may inhabit it.”
But though her drawings are made as a way for her to make sense of her environment, the finished piece, more often than not, is a far cry from realism. In fact, most of them make up for a surrealist setting that might as well be a fairytale backdrop.
“I suppose they are places devoid of people, sprawling and illogical,” said Kemp in an interview with MJCarty. “The longer you look at them, the less and less sense they make. The detail makes it all hang together, believable only for a moment.”
This non-sensical quality to her work is very much intentional, and is the direct result of her practice, which relies on little to no planning ahead: “I never really know what the work will look like,” says Kemp. “I think they are too big and too detailed to be able to foresee it all before making it. I have a vague idea—’like ‘a forest of treehouses’—then I just run with it taking each day as it comes.”
Seeing her in action might just inspire you to roll your sleeves and get to work.
