A recent graduate of the painting programme at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, Rowan Dahl spent much time discussing The Apocalypse with tutor Derrick Guild RSA, and the now constant presence of the end of the world in our imaginations; the zombie persistence of visions from the past in an eroding present. Dahl abstracts details from the work of Dürer and subjects them to intense re-investigation and re-assembly, with a beautiful pared-back sensibility for line and its applications. Her Courtesy of St. Michael renders a dragon’s head and contorted natural forms almost in the manner of a plant skeleton, slowly fading away to dust. The drawing is rendered so effectively it is possible to believe that this image will simply be an unmarked piece of paper in a few years’ time. In a series of responses entitled Bright, bird, horse and animal forms over-write one another in a death spiral of mark making.
There’s a sense in these last images of Dahl’s that visions of the apocalypse are ever present; that somehow we can feel its nearness and are beginning to realise that it is something of a durational process rather than the sudden rupture that we have been accustomed to expecting. These works are a disassembling of the visions and motions of the apocalypse, in order perhaps to try and neutralise them, and to convey both a familiarity with these visions and an acceptance that we may actually see them brought to reality.
Extract from text by Jon Backwood
