Working across drawing, painting and sculpture, Laith McGregor’s multi-disciplinary practice considers the relationship between identity, place and image making. Tall Tale is comprised of the artist’s well-known monochromatic pencil drawings on paper, alongside a series of experimental hand-built and painted ceramic pots.

These drawings require significant labour and time spent to build up dense bands of pencil marks that form abstract and figurative images. McGregor’s visual language includes meticulously drawn linear and nonlinear lines, geometric shapes (triangles, circles, squares), chessboards, historical figures and objects from his mother’s collection. The coffee percolators that often recur in his works are drawn with fond recollection of his father’s daily habit of brewing and drinking coffee – associating this process with time and patience.

McGregor often responds to the conditions of his environment, particularly surrounding his Byron Bay home and studio. The drought and limited water supply caused by blazing bushfires in early 2020 encouraged the artist to reflect upon the storage and transport of water, resulting in the making of various ceramic vessels. These functional objects sit on plinths made from painted tree stumps, repurposed from a tree that was felled in order to build his studio.

Existing between fiction and non-fiction, negative and positive, black and white, two- and three- dimensional, McGregor’s practice serves as an ongoing inquiry into the complexities of what it means to be human.