Charles Avery

About Charles Avery

I had sought this strange land with a view to being its discoverer.
- Charles Avery

Charles Avery's practice ranges between sculptural and object based installations, large-scale graphite drawings and narrative texts, with which he describes the topography, history and culture of an imaginary island. A love of nonsense, fantasy and humour is found amongst a plethora of souvenirs, keepsakes and fantastical beasts all of which allow Avery to speculate about the nature of truth and reality, the essence of creativity and the role of art in society.

Drawing, central to articulating Avery's role as this strange lands architect, varies between the highly detailed to the sketchy and unresolved, gradually disappearing the closer the image travels toward its edge, creating dream-like worlds where the harder you look, the more you discover.

Imbued with a formal beauty and sense of enquiry, Avery's practice invites the viewer to recreate the Island in their own minds, and to use it as an arena for exploring philosophical conundrums and paradoxes.

Place de la Revolution, a suite of six lithographs, are studies for a larger diorama drawing which, alongside sculpture and film, depict a circus of cyclists, isolated from the chaos of the larger scene, encouraging an interrogation of their uncanny relationship to this world, before being absorbed back into their imaginary one.

Be not afraid, the isle is full of noises that bring delight and hurt not.
- The Tempest