BIOGRAPHY
Hyperrealist, Miriam Innes is preoccupied by the metropolis yet her choice of natural materials reflects upon her childhood spent in Ireland’s marshlands. Oscillating between two worlds - the natural and built environment - she likens the organic qualities of her medium, charcoal, to the 'bog oak' found close to her home. Its simplicity, Innes asserts, renders it overlooked and understated, a notion echoed in her choice of mono-tone palette, yet her cityscapes loom large and are rich in their complexity.
Working in grayscale tones the artists takes out the noise and visual assaults of the city, focusing instead on meditative linear details - the crisp lines of the pavement, the geometry of windows in sequence and of fire escape ladders zig-zagging across a facade. Leaving the familiarity of the rural environment the artist moved between cities in Asia, America, Europe, the Middle East, and Australia impacted by her travels and the eclectic environments she emerged herself in.
The artist, seeking out urban icons, looked first to the streets of Melbourne. She produced works between 2009 and 2011 as part of her Melbourne Tours series that faithfully relayed the architectural high points of the city’s docks or her strolls along Browns Lane, gazing upwards at sneakers wrapped around telephone wires. Her work, increasing in scale through her artistic progression seeks to faithfully capture the status of the city while offering a sense of intimacy and individual expression beyond the traditional bounds of hyperrealism. Looking to New York City as her next destination, the monumental New York Rambling (2019), is a vast a 24-metre drawing and installation, produced in exquisite accuracy, that took over two years to complete. Innes insists that the viewer is implicated in her output, she intends them to ‘experience’ her work rather than passively observing. The artist’s choice to work in large-scale places the viewer firmly inside the built environment, offering those who haven’t had the chance to visit a large city, a taste of its vastness and proportions.
The cosmopolitan space holds profound possibilities for Innes. Visually, it’s rich with the shadows, lines, reflections, and textures that inform her output but beyond this, the artist is fascinated with the individual and collective narratives enclosed within. Each brick, marked by human contact, is laid down by an individual, it then unites with millions of other bricks, forming first a building, then a street, and ultimately a global city like New York - a place of mythology and cinematic glory. Innes understands this as a human cycle of connections which she, through her art becomes a part of. The built environment is a product of man which she dutifully relays through her sketches, honouring those who created it and transposing their labour into a new reality through the fragility of her medium. With wonder, we now witness the cityscape, detailed through the eyes of an artist who continues her infatuation with it.
Miriam Innes CV
