It’s Not the Bullet that Kills You (It’s the Hole) is a collection of drawings by two artists who use the resultant trace of an implement or weapon in the creation of their works; scalpel contact for the sake of line, rivets for the sake of holes.

Atchison’s sgraffito drawings are created via a process of material removal, an act of revelation. The drawings are freed from their support by means of a shallow orifice in the superficial layer, to reveal wild colour below. Bodies emerge and are subsumed within an uncertain black plane where negative space has greater weight than delineated form.

In de Bruyn’s work incarnations of drag queen Divine, native banksias, priests and totemic heads speared like shashliks are made to inhabit a singular narrative plane in a rhapsody of borrowed mysticism. de Bruyn’s drawings are assemblages of icons that the artist represents in complex, impossible relationships.

Andrew Atchison and Pia de Bruyn have been collaborating in various forms since 2001 including public drawing works, poster designs for Next Wave Festival and an ongoing Polaroid project recording live performance. Music, queer sexuality and Australian cultural iconography are common interests and recurrent themes each artist’s practice.