WILLIAM DENNISUK: Gravity and Light

Gravity and Light / Nature and Culture

Artist’s Statement by William Dennisuk

This text serves as both an introduction and reflection on my ongoing series Gravity and Light / Nature and Culture. Over the next two years, this body of work will form the basis for three solo exhibitions and three group presentations. In what follows, I explore some of the ideas and processes that shape the drawings — how forces such as gravity and light, nature and culture, act not only as subjects but as participants in the making of the work. Together, these reflections form a meditation on the balance between control and chance, continuity and transience.

The title Gravity and Light / Nature and Culture suggests a paradox, but for me it names the ground on which these drawings exist — a space where opposing forces meet and begin to cohere. The series evolves less as a collection of discrete works than as an ongoing investigation into the forces that shape an image, and by extension, the ways we position ourselves between the natural and the cultural.

I often think of my drawings as sites of extra-pictorial transformation — places where the image remains porous to what lies beyond it. They are not sealed compositions, but open systems: their surfaces responsive to circumstance — gravity, light, dust, even the quiet movement of air.

Nature and Culture

The imagery I return to is modest: plant life arranged within domestic settings. Yet this simplicity conceals a deeper tension. These still lifes mediate between cultivation and wilderness, between the human wish to order and the world’s resistance to containment. I am not seeking nostalgia or critique; what interests me is the point of suspension — the instant before resolution, when balance feels fragile, and the whole arrangement might just slip away.

That near-instability gives the drawings their charge. The sense of balance I aim for is always temporary — a momentary equilibrium that acknowledges change as inevitable.

Gravity

Gravity, both physical and metaphorical, is central to the making of this work. I rely on it quite literally: letting charcoal dust fall from the top of the sheet, forming soft vertical veils. These traces are as much shaped by time and descent as by my hand. The image, in a sense, is formed through falling.

In these marks, I find echoes of weather, atmosphere, memory — a quiet record of erosion and accumulation. They suggest a world in which material processes continue long after the act of drawing ends. Gravity, though invisible, becomes a collaborator: an unseen force that completes the work.

Light

Light enters the drawings from the side — sometimes as sunlight passing through a window, sometimes as a projected beam. I treat it as an unpredictable participant rather than a controlled element. It interrupts, refracts, unsettles. The light cuts across the descent of the charcoal, creating counter-movements, dispersing the vertical order established by gravity.

These intrusions of light bring chance into the process. They create moments that can’t be planned, only received. In this sense, light introduces a kind of restlessness — a tension between what I can determine and what I must accept.

Intention / Purpose

Throughout the series, I’m exploring whether these paired forces — gravity and light, nature and culture — truly oppose one another, or whether they might coexist within a single field of meaning. I’m drawn to the possibility of a conditional harmony, one defined not by resolution but by sustained coexistence.

What continues to compel me is the fragile balance between control and surrender — the interplay between the seen and the unseen, the natural and the shaped. These drawings, for me, are quiet meditations on continuity and transience: on what endures and what fades. The dust falls, the light shifts, the image holds — just long enough for recognition to occur.