Exhibition Review – Dust, Moon, Deluge: Drawn Through Time

Somewhere between moon landings, hoaxes, UFO testimonies, climate dread, and the ambient suspicion that reality itself is now mediated beyond repair, Drawn Through Time begins to feel oddly urgent. Penny McCarthy’s work seems, at first, too quiet for such a charged atmosphere. A blown egg becomes the moon; laptop dust becomes a constellation; fog becomes both Venetian weather and a symptom of the mind. Yet this is precisely the point. At Lakeside Arts, drawing is not presented as a retreat from contemporary crisis, but as a way of staying with it when the image-world has become almost too fast to believe.

The exhibition’s central proposition is deceptively simple: drawing allows artists to travel through time. McCarthy’s encounter with Titian’s monumental woodcut The Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea (c.1549), a sixteenth-century image of catastrophe, rescue, political allegory, and waterborne violence, anchors the show. Her six months of looking and redrawing might sound like an act of reverence. But it is more interesting than that. McCarthy does not merely recover Titian; she pressures him. She asks whether an image of biblical disaster, once tied to Venice’s own political anxieties, can speak to a present shaped by rising seas, ecological panic, pandemic isolation, and the strange fatigue of endless information.

To claim that a Renaissance woodcut ‘predicts’ our catastrophes would be too easy, almost conspiratorial in itself. McCarthy seems aware of this danger. In Pentimento she admits wanting Titian’s work to offer ‘an image of my own post-modern self’, while recognising that it cannot quite do so. This hesitation gives the exhibition its intelligence. Time does not collapse into a neat correspondence between then and now. It stutters and misremembers and leaves tidal stains.

The moon, too, is never quite innocent in McCarthy’s hands. In Moon Egg (2021) and Aglaonice (2011), it becomes a problem of knowledge: something mapped, misread, mythologised, and, in Aglaonice’s case, weaponised against a woman who understood it too well. The woman who can read the eclipse is recast as a sorceress. It is a small but brilliant turn in the exhibition’s thinking: misrecognition is not simply a failure of looking, but one of its historical conditions.

That instability of scale and meaning is clearest in works such as Laptop Dust (2020). Made around the period when many of us knew the world through such screens, Laptop Dust is wonderfully double-edged: the residue of a device becomes an image of the cosmos, a petri dish, a polluted pond. It is funny, and slightly horrible. During Covid, when screens became classrooms, galleries, offices, and social worlds, dust on glass was not just dust. It was evidence of touch, breath, neglect, dependency, and of the microscopic particles through which disaster had entered ordinary life in the first place. McCarthy’s graphite insists that the smallest surfaces still contain enormity. We can zoom in; we can zoom out.

The show’s achievement lies in refusing to make this a private lyricism. Around McCarthy, the other artists complicate the argument. Billy Hughes’ redrawn found photographs and AI-projected futures ask whether technology only accelerates images, or whether it can also expose their habits and clichés. His Untitled (Wade Remake) (2026) is especially unsettling: AI imagines a future baptism by multiplying bodies, as if faith, community, or ideology were just predictive pattern. Jonathan Owen’s erasures perform the opposite operation. By removing figures from cinematic images, he makes absence active; history becomes something rubbed out but not gone. Emma Kay’s The World from Memory (2003) offers another corrective, reminding us that what we think we know, from the Bible to the map to the shared image of the world, is often a fragile reconstruction.

This is why the exhibition’s emphasis on sustained attention matters. It might sound like a wholesome antidote to phones, dopamine loops, and Google-induced certainty. But the best works here avoid moralising. Drawing is not pure because it is handmade; nor is it automatically truthful because it is slow. Rather, slowness becomes a method of doubt. It lets an image become less obvious. It allows dust to become sky, submersion to become climate, baptism to become migration, Venice to become brain fog, and the moon to become an egg held in the hand.

There is something almost unfashionably generous, even playful, about the exhibition’s belief that anyone can pick up a pencil. The works are extraordinarily skilled, yes, sometimes almost intimidatingly so. But they remind us that accessibility need not mean ease, and that looking is a discipline before it is a pleasure. If Drawn Through Time has a quiet politics, it is this: in an age that rewards instant recognition, drawing protects the time before that recognition hardens. It gives us back the strange, necessary interval in which thought is still forming. I urge you to go, and to give it more time than you think you have. Not because drawing is quaint, or because slowness is automatically virtuous, but because this exhibition makes a persuasive case for attention as a form of care. It makes the pencil feel newly strange: cheap, humble, almost embarrassingly available, and yet capable of holding more time than most of our devices. You may leave wanting to find one in a drawer somewhere. I did.

Drawn Through Time is a free exhibition that runs until Sunday 26 July. Visit this free exhibition at Lakeside Arts’ Djanogly Gallery. Find out more here: Drawn Through Time – Lakeside Arts, Nottingham

Gypsy Beck is a final-year History of Art student and aspiring curator at the University of Nottingham, beginning the MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture at Trinity College, Oxford in October. Her writing and curatorial interests sit at the intersection of contemporary art, material culture, sensory experience, science, technology, and shifting modes of perception. She co-directed the student curatorial collective Crop Up Gallery this academic year.