A thought-provoking exhibition in Macroom displays drawings by artists better known for their sculpture, writes GEMMA TIPTON

SOMETIMES SIDELINED in the hierarchies of the art world, drawing can seem like the “little sister” form, the thing you do on the way to doing something else. Drawing is relegated to preparatory sketches for larger paintings, studies for sculpture, shorthand notes made in quick strokes before the major, more significant work is done.

Where this is true, it is nonetheless interesting, allowing a glimpse of the artist's process, the ideas gone through, mapped out, rejected and selected to create work that may seem so complete it's not always easy to find an imaginative way in. But this way of looking at drawing excludes a great deal, and this is evident in Mapping Form, an exhibition in Macroom, Co Cork, in which curator Norah Norton has selected four artists known for their practice as sculptors, and created an exhibition that focuses instead on their drawing. Marie Foley, John Gibbons, Eilís O'Connell and Michael Quane are all graduates of Cork's Crawford College of Art, and each shows a suite of drawings and one sculpture, except in the case of Foley, who has three sculptures on display.

So looking at these drawings, can we expect to find similarities – are these artists using drawing as a way of laying out smaller and more delicate two-dimensional treatments of the forms to follow? The answer, in this exhibition, is no – although I suspect that has more to do with the curator’s selections than it does with the working practice of the artists.

Norton has not chosen to exhibit sketches, preparatory or otherwise. Instead, the works on the walls (rather than on the plinths) are, as Norton says, “expressions in their own right”.

In the case of Foley, the framed works are hardly drawings. They do contain marks made in ink – tiny circling arrows, painstakingly precise – but other small objects are there too, pieces of porcelain, metal dividers, a wooden ruler. It is only the fact of their being held to a background of paper, surrounded by a wooden frame and fronted with glass that allows a designation of these intriguingly, vaguely allusive compositions as drawings.

The connections between Foley's "drawings" and her sculptures are strong. In this exhibition, the trio of sculptures are all slightly sexual, or rather, reproductive. Glass jars stoppered with fragile porcelain pieces contain egg-like objects ( Inseeing 1 and 2), and a medical-looking glass tube that could be fallopian holds more of these small porcelain balls, though this time stoppered with polished yew wood ( Inseeing 3). Foley's sculptures are enigmatic and have a fragile charm, the delicacy of her materials bestowing a sense of subtlety on the forms.

Not so with John Gibbons, whose three-metre-high stainless steel piece, Presence – Wait, is unabashedly either totemic or phallic (or are they the same thing?), and is topped with something small and purple. In the accompanying catalogue, Gibbons describes how the nature of the materials he uses, as it responds to being worked, "opens up ways of seeing", and if there is any connecting feature between the work of the four artists in this exhibition, apart from them all having studied at the Crawford, it is in their sensitivity to the materials they employ.

Gibbons’ drawings, executed in ink and acrylic on handmade paper, have an immediacy that implies a hurried, impulsive working method. The hurry is deceptive, though not the impulse, as Gibbons lines his studio with his drawings-in- process, and adds to them as they grab his attention. They can, he says, “be worked on over many years in very different locations”. Tempted by the curatorial agenda of the exhibition to seek a thread connecting these drawings with the sculpture, I find strong gestural marks, and the lines that appear on the stainless steel echoed, though only faintly, in paint and ink.

Any selection of an artist's work for a group exhibition is going to edit and exclude, and works are chosen to tell the story the show has set out to narrate. In the case of Eilís O'Connell, her one piece of sculpture, Vulture Feature, a single feather held upright in clear cast resin, is representative of just one aspect of her work. As a sculptor, she is otherwise much better known for large outdoor pieces, and smaller highly polished forms that seem like liquid frozen in heavy flux. The resin-cast vulture feather notwithstanding, of all the artists in the exhibition, it is O'Connell whose drawings seem to have least in common with her sculpture. As with Foley and Gibbons, the definition of drawing is stretched, as O'Connell is showing monoprints and a watercolour including a nest of copper wire.

There is a lightness and delicacy in O’Connell’s prints and painting, and, as with Gibbons, the material dictates the form. Here it seems that drawing (whether with ink or wire) is an opportunity to revel in the small, the half-hinted, the hazy edges of ideas, that working with cast bronze denies.

There is a clear gender divide in Mapping Form, the men making strong, muscular work, and the women working with lighter materials. Michael Quane's hewn-stone sculpture and his pencil drawings are the works where the confluence between drawing and sculpture are to be seen most clearly. Interestingly enough, Quane only took to drawing recently.

“I was always too impatient,” he says. “The drawing happened on the material”. With drawing, he adds, “the work isn’t dictated by the materials”, although I think he means it is not dictated to the degree the shape of a sculpture is dictated by the scale (and imperfections) of a piece of stone. Quane’s drawings feel as solid as his sculptures, although there is a sense of him enjoying the opportunity for experiment.

It’s an interesting show, and while I hesitate to find particular arguments within it, what is clear is that drawing, in its own right, is just as satisfying as sculpture, and often even more so.

Macroom Town Hall Gallery, Co Cork, until July 31st