Blaise Drummond was born in Liverpool in 1967, but has lived and worked in Ireland for many years. His influences include 1960s American land art, punk rock, the characteristic architecture of Le Corbusier and Alvar Alto, the notes made by writer Henry D. Thoreau during his stay at Walden, and the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. These sources of inspiration may at first glance seem widely disparate, but all are concerned with contradictions between nature and culture, i.e. the civilised versus the uncontrollable.
Drummond’s works are represented in several public collections, including the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, France; the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
I grew up in the suburbs, between the city and the country, amongst houses and trees, birdsong, gardens and streets. The paintings attest to the desire for some state of grace and stasis in the world. So when excerpts from field guides and taxonomic books appear in my works I suppose that they are at once recalling a private and a universal lost eden. Beyond that the interplay between natural and architectural forms that occurs frequently in my work is obviously an exploration of the idea of that binary sort of attitude that underpins much of European thought, as well as taking pleasure in the formal, pictorial manifestation of that same duality. I think fundamentally all the works are probably an attempt to grasp at some half remembered vision of balance in world.
Blaise Drummond, 2014
“Our relationship with nature is fascinating. From green spaces in cities, to the in-between of the suburbs, to the idea of finding peace in a cabin in the woods, nature accompanies our lives, a necessary presence, and counterpoint to the relentless drive of civilization. Blaise Drummond captures that intersection brilliantly. He sees how we desire wildness, even as we tame the land, frame it, cultivate it and try to hold it still.
Bringing in influences from modernist architecture, literature and music, Blaise shows how this conflict – or counterbalance – is, in many ways, an echo of how we exist ourselves. As we are caught between wildness and a need for order, dreams and practical realities, art comes as close as anything can to bringing such conflicting wishes together.”
