This is an artist’s book that accompanies Aleana Egan’s solo exhibition at The Drawing Room in 2011.

Drawing forms the starting point of Egan’s work, with a sketchbook providing a repository for the noting down of ideas and experimentation with forms that are developed into autonomous drawings, collages, sculptures and films.

Ideas are triggered through observations made during everyday life, but also by memories of childhood experiences and works of literature.

Often inchoate, these are atmospheric and sensory triggers that lack narrative definition and carry through into her practice through a subtle and intuitive working process.

For example, it was the aura of tightness, a certain tension, that reading Jean Rhy’s novel Good Morning, Midnight left her with, and it was this quality that she sought to engender in a sculptural form Character, 2010, although quite different from the drawing that Egan made after reading this story, does retain some of its characteristics.