Louis Blue Newby & Laila Majid

Laila: We always try to be careful and controlled when we approach shows, these works needed the space that they did, and we wanted to place an emphasis on the process of drawing alone. When making these works, there is no way of rushing them.
Inner Heat is a phrase that we came across in a chapter by Michael Taussig called Secrecy Magnifies Reality. Taussig discusses how secrets pulsate with this “inner heat” and what happens in the process of their revealing, which he describes as this volatile, destabilising flash of exposure. It was a really important text for the show and contextualises a lot of the ideas that we were playing around with.

Louis: The premise behind the Contact drawings is to take found images, often rapidly consumed then discarded, and take them through a long and drawn-out process of transformation. Pushing the image through different lenses, textures and mediums, it eventually becomes something very different. There is a formality to the drawings that we like, one that transforms disposable images into something that actually demands your time and attention and calls for a different type of reading. Such a formality and resulting austerity is contained in the graphite surface, creating a coldness and also instilling the images with a power that they never had.
It also gives it a more manual, more analogue appeal. Had we done them in colour, they would have carried through the vividness of the digital images, and you wouldn't be able to see all the layers of processing, like stripping back information and blowing the images up, all these steps produce difference, though visually tied to the original sources.

Louis: Online images, traditionally, are consumed pretty quickly. Translated to drawing, this process changes. At the core of our collaboration is our interest in image culture and its consumption. Ephemeral online images with often questionable ownership fly through numerous hands, touching a lot of people, making them almost weightless. Our drawings solidify that intangible character, rendering the images physical, while also leaning into a certain phantasmic potential. The hazy surfaces don’t allow the viewer to get close, to understand or consume easily. As much as the surface gives you, it also withholds.
There is an eroticism in that relationship. The image, once readily consumable, suddenly withholds itself, denying or controlling one's access to it. It claims autonomy, pushing you back as much as it pulls you in.

Laila: Things have a habit of arriving at your phone. Scrolling on Instagram, TikTok or Reddit, sometimes you’ll find something very unexpected. We also spend time combing through different forums, they are a great resource, you never know what you’ll stumble across. Counterpublics, anonymous groups of people connected through shared consumption, exist across online and print cultures.
Louis: To give you an example: in the work Contact (Forum), is a stag in the forest and a person wearing a Halloween mask that we found via a feed that compiles bizarre trailcam photography.

Laila: Repetition, for us, is tied to the idea of mediating and destabilising specific textures and surfaces. In that way, it becomes this process of possibility, change or recontextualization. There is also a type of intimacy in that: the more the image gets repeated, the more time is spent in contact with the work.
Louis: That echoes in the repetitive nature of our process as well. Line by line, the drawings are created through prolonged exposure and touch. This is especially true for the larger works where the same image may be drawn more than once it is intimate yet strange to do the same thing over again.

Laila: We screenshot our online sources, and re-photograph them from a screen, using a thermal print camera — a printer and a camera in one. Like a receipt printer, it doesn't print in ink but relies on heat and pressure instead, which creates really fine lines — that’s where the linear structure comes from. After that, those prints are scanned again, enlarged, and then we create the drawings from them.
Interesting things happen when you turn the original pixelation of a screenshot into this linear pattern; it disrupts the texture, although you get the sense that you might be looking at something that is a bit pixelated or a bit out of focus — a new grain or an analogue texture is applied to what is otherwise quite a smooth digital image.
Louis: The transference from one to another was something that conceptually interested us, but also, speaking on a pure material level, the linear structure gave us a way in which we, as two people, could produce a drawing that feels truly uniform. This mechanical process of production allows us to replicate the lines, removing the individual hand from the work. The lines help to flatten things out and make it possible for us to draw together.
From the initial linear structure comes the process of addition and erasure. To get that soft application, we have to lay down a layer of graphite, and then remove the vast majority of it. And then we lay it down again. The rubbing away creates that sense of direction and movement that you feel in the drawings. It makes people wonder whether the drawings were made really quickly or really slowly — you don't quite know just by looking at them.

Laila: Once more, there is a push and pull here: the benches are designed to allow rest, but you can never really sit comfortably. The handrails work in a similar way: as functional design, you can hold them, but they really create a barrier in front of the work, pushing you away.
Louis: They are objects lifted from public spaces; we were interested in the relationship between the private relationship we have with images in that wider context. There is a threshold between the private and the public that we wanted to situate our work in for this show. It was great to be given the time and ability to think about the context of the space, its history and architecture, and how we wanted this body of drawings to be shown.

Louis: There's a playful deviancy in a lot of the works that you might not immediately notice but reveals itself over time. It is equally rewarding when people who know what they're looking at understand it and build a personal relationship with the images. There is a playfulness that allows some aspect of disidentification, which makes it possible to read out works as quite formal drawings. The idea is to recode or recycle that formal language of drawing, but in doing so, to open it up to a more subversive world. So, while at first, there is a moment of contemplating the labour-intensity and beauty, hopefully, it is followed by the realisation that there is something perverted happening here, too.

Laila: This is something that we have been really interested in since we started working together — making composite prints where we scanned old, printed material, and then digitally layered these images with really low quality imagery we'd find online, resulting in a combination of hazy pixelation and very high resolution half-tone textures. The print and digital qualities spoke to different times or temporalities, and we were intrigued by what happens when they overlap and create a new kind of in-between language.
Similarly, when we made our film, south florida sky, we reshot the two distinct sequences of the film — hand drawn, digitised animation, and digital GAN generated imagery — using a 16mm film camera, which resulted in a doubling of digital animation and analogue grain.
Louis: There is a direct collapsing of different technologies or different temporalities here. In our Spread works we collage different scanned imagery from various sources, which is a distinct, flattening process. Unmooring an image from its distinct point in time and then setting it free changes the way you view it. The analogue texture of the drawings uproots them from the now and makes them feel like they are more substantial, older, maybe a part of history, changing the way that you might look at them. The framing in Inner Heat is very specific as well — the drawings are framed in archival-looking perspex cases, which almost turn them into artefacts, again altering their perception.
This process of collapse creates a new space in which we can slow down and re-approach images.