Charles Avery: Onomatopoeia Part 2: The Port

Since 2005, Charles Avery has devoted his practice to the description of a fictional world. Avery's intricately conceived territory exists through drawings, sculptures, installations and text. Exhibited episodically, these heterogeneous elements serve as terms within the unifying structure of the Island - as multiple emissions of an imaginary world, and as a meditation on the central themes of philosophy and the problems of art-making.

Avery's first exhibition at Pilar Corrias Gallery presents a single five meter drawing - the artist's largest and most ambitious work on paper to date -  depicting the port of Onomatopoeia - the town, and gateway to  the Island. Rich in detail and conceptual layering, the drawing describes a quayside bustling with locals, day-trippers and itinerants, pushers and skalds. Shown alongside a mysterious old photograph of a city viewed from the sea and a short text, this epic drawing exists as reportage of an unreachable realm, suggesting that the way to the Island is not achieved by plane or boat, but by looking inward towards a subjective horizon. The ultimate destination of this epic venture is the documentation of this 'heterotopia' in a book of many volumes.

Born in Oban, Scotland in 1973, Charles Avery lives and works in London. The most comprehensive presentation of The Islanders project to date, 'The Islanders: An Introduction' was exhibited at Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London in 2008 and toured to The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and Museum Boijamas Van Beunigan, Rotterdam in 2009. Future solo presentations include Kunstverein, Hannover and Frac Ile de France/Le Plateau, Paris. Recent group exhibitions include Life Forms, Bonniers Konsthalle, Stockholm (2009); A Walk in Your Mind, Hayward Gallery, (2009); A Duck for Mr Darwin, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, (2009), and Altermodern: 4th Tate Triennial, London (2009). Avery represented Scotland at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007.