MICHAEL CRAIG-MARTIN 109


tree, purely through his intention. Representing the culmination of his conceptual work, the humorous piece expresses the notion that belief fundamentally shapes our experience of art. ‘You either believe in a work or you do not,’ he has said.


For Craig-Martin, An Oak Tree represented a ‘full stop’ in his practice, after which he turned away from ready-made objects to their pictorial representation. Another section of the RA exhibition reveals how a renewed interest in drawing gave rise to his large- scale wall drawings of everyday household items, executed in black tape with the aid of overhead projectors (each object was initially


As an artist, Michael Craig- Martin has made a career of subverting the ordinary and making the familiar seem strange


drawn freehand in line and traced onto drafting film). Te drawing style is deliberately anonymous: ‘My initial idea had been to remove my hand from the drawing process in order to make a representation of an object that was as ordinary as the object itself,’ Craig- Martin has explained. All of the objects he chose to represent had been designed and manufactured and were fundamental to daily life yet were so commonplace that they had essentially become invisible. By making them the subject of his art, Craig-Martin encourages viewers to see them afresh, while his various juxtapositions create numerous associations and threads of meaning.


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