October 9 – November 5, 2025
Opening Reception October 9, 5:00-8:00 pm
Closing Reception: November 2, 2:00-5:00 pm
The U-M Duderstadt Center Gallery presents By Means of a Pencil a solo exhibition by artist and Stamps School of Art & Design LEO Lecturer I Nathan Byrne.
By Means of a Pencil brings together a body of work centered around the quirky and enigmatic Swiss author Robert Walser. In this exhibition poetic gestures and nods to Walser are able to flourish as visual forms and objects. The work comprises spontaneous and excessively durational works of drawing, collage, and sculpture.
For years, I have been intrigued by the author Robert Walser’s mark making which he referred to as his “pencil method” where he would sketch out stories in a radically miniaturized script on diminutive paper fragments. Walser’s pencil method began when he was experiencing severe writer’s cramp and: “hideously and frightfully hated his pen.” He goes on in a letter written in 1927 describing the freeing nature of this process: “I suffered a real breakdown in my hand on account of the pen, a sort of cramp from whose clutches I slowly, laboriously freed myself by means of the pencil.”
Just as it was with Walser “by means of a pencil” I was able to make peace with drawing by radically altering the process by which I approached the act itself. Eventually, this became processes like my transcription drawings, in which I write out an entire novel as a form of mark making.
While this exhibition mines the Walser archive and the spirit of this author, this work is just as much about me and my immersion in this “world of Walser.” It is about my own engagement with relationships between language and mark making, language and sculpture, language and longing.
This project was made possible by the generous support of Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan.
Poster design by Sky Christoph.
Hours: 12 – 6 pm, Tues. – Fri. & Sun.
Location: 2281 Bonisteel Blvd, Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Opening Reception October 9, 5:00-8:00 pm
Closing Reception: November 2, 2:00-5:00 pm
The U-M Duderstadt Center Gallery presents By Means of a Pencil a solo exhibition by artist and Stamps School of Art & Design LEO Lecturer I Nathan Byrne.
By Means of a Pencil brings together a body of work centered around the quirky and enigmatic Swiss author Robert Walser. In this exhibition poetic gestures and nods to Walser are able to flourish as visual forms and objects. The work comprises spontaneous and excessively durational works of drawing, collage, and sculpture.
For years, I have been intrigued by the author Robert Walser’s mark making which he referred to as his “pencil method” where he would sketch out stories in a radically miniaturized script on diminutive paper fragments. Walser’s pencil method began when he was experiencing severe writer’s cramp and: “hideously and frightfully hated his pen.” He goes on in a letter written in 1927 describing the freeing nature of this process: “I suffered a real breakdown in my hand on account of the pen, a sort of cramp from whose clutches I slowly, laboriously freed myself by means of the pencil.”
Just as it was with Walser “by means of a pencil” I was able to make peace with drawing by radically altering the process by which I approached the act itself. Eventually, this became processes like my transcription drawings, in which I write out an entire novel as a form of mark making.
While this exhibition mines the Walser archive and the spirit of this author, this work is just as much about me and my immersion in this “world of Walser.” It is about my own engagement with relationships between language and mark making, language and sculpture, language and longing.
This project was made possible by the generous support of Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan.
Poster design by Sky Christoph.
Hours: 12 – 6 pm, Tues. – Fri. & Sun.
Location: 2281 Bonisteel Blvd, Ann Arbor, MI 48109
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