John Berger and Marisa Camino

Beginning in December 2005, during Cork's year as the European Capital of Culture, an exhibition (organised by the artist Jim Savage) of previously unknown collaborative drawings produced by John Berger and the Spanish artist Marisa Camino will be shown at John P. Quinlan's Vangard Gallery in Carey's Lane, Cork.

John Berger, renowned author and one of the most eminent commentators on art and culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, was born in London in 1926 and lives and works in a small farming village in Haute Savoie, in the French Alps, close to the Swiss border. He is the author of more than twenty books including novels, anthologies of essays on art and contemporary culture, photo-documentaries (with Jean Mohr), plays (with Nella Bielski) and film scripts. In the seventies he received the Booker Prize for fiction for his novel G, and he scripted and presented the BBC's groundbreaking series on art: Ways of Seeing. He has always had a special interest in drawing, both as a writer and as a maker and he has exhibited his drawings in galleries in Europe and North America.

For more than twelve years now, John Berger has been engaged in a long-distance collaboration with the Spanish artist Marisa Camino. Their collaboration works, without words, is conducted mostly by post, and takes the form of an ongoing production of a series of drawings.

The beginning to a drawing is made by one of them and sent through the post to the other. On receiving it, the other is free to respond by taking this initial fragment further - adding to it, amending it, erasing, drawing over - doing whatever seems appropriate in response to its 'message'. The interaction continues until the drawing is deemed 'finished', each artist allowing the other total freedom.

The drawings that have emerged out of this process were initially made in a kind of privacy - with no intention, on the part of either artist of ever exhibiting them. Few people even knew of their existence. They were elements in a collaboration that, over time, evolved its own particular intimacy and its own particular range of visual concerns, engaging the drawing's creators in a very special kind of communication - almost a conversation, but a conversation not made through words.

Neither of the artists would, or could, have produced any of these images working alone - the works could only have come into existence through this creative collaging of two imaginations. This apparently seamless collusion of minds and sensibilities not only creates each new work, but also, in a sense, imaginatively brings into being the 'virtual' existence of another creator, the conjured presence of a third artist.