Published in: The Herald, 25 August 2007
By Jack Mottram
You never know quite what to expect from the Jerwood Drawing Prize show. One year, the changing committee of judges will stick hard and fast to artists who make drawings in the usual sense (marks on paper, that sort of thing); the next, the show will be overwhelmed with work that, however far you widen the definition of the drawn, falls into other categories, from sculpture to new media and all points in between.
This time, the selection panel, faced with the unenviable task of whittling down nigh-on 3000 anonymously submitted entries into the shortlist of 87 pieces that make up this show, has managed to strike a balance between the two extremes, including artists who push hard at the boundaries of the form, and work that lies firmly within the drawing tradition. The judges – Paul Bonaventura of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, art historian Catherine de Zegher and artist Avis Newman – have also quietly teased out themes in contemporary drawing practice, placing like artists with like, with the result that the exhibition takes on the feel of a conversation about the state of drawing today between the artists who practise it.
The first striking piece on show comes from two artists who have put down their pencils and picked up a computer, Sean O’Keefe and Steve Bullock. How to Draw a Cowboy is a pseudo-scientific, vaguely retro digital display that sees points (labelled “gun” or “spur”) track, leaving coloured trails, until the just-recognisable cowboy dissolves away. It’s a game attempt to draw the passage of time.
The Jerwood first prize and student prize each went to animators. Student prize-winner Daisy Richardson’s Sublime Climes is a delightfully amateurish stop-motion collage, which transforms images torn from magazines into a concise geological history of an imagined world. Melanie Jackson’s A Global Positioning System, which won her the first prize, has a similar ecologically aware edge. It opens with a man ordering a GPS unit from a gadget magazine, then tracks the product from assembly line to delivery by courier. Wittily political, and rendered in a light, naive cartoon style, Jackson’s piece is good – but visitors could be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at a digital animation scooping the top honour.
Still within the fold of drawing, but adopting innovative approaches, are the artists who have turned to new processes. Second prize-winner Brighid Lowe has filled a large sheet of paper with dense horizontal lines for Rain Drawing (1) before, as the title suggests, letting a downpour finish her piece with damp dots and spots. Tim Knowles made his Tree Drawing by affixing a pen to the branch of a Scots pine, abdicating artistic responsibility to the wind, which made a series of finicky marks.
There seems, too, to be something of a fad for infographics. Sophie Horton’s Studio Environment is an embroidered chart, with coloured threads tracking the noises the artist heard in her studio, while Susie Parfitt has crafted a complex, incomprehensible graph of decisions taken according to unnamed “policy options”. John Holden provides a minimal counterpoint, his Grid 2 a precise set of vertical lines and nodes, a soft suggestion of ordered information.
On the sculptural front, Luke Drodz has drilled through a Pelican paperback, Art in England, stuffing the off-cut discs into a frame beside the desecrated text. More subtly, Mitsuko Hoshino’s Air (Lotus Pond) has leaves sketched on folded paper, simulating ripples in water.
Last but not least: the drawings. Minho Kwon stands out with My Brand New Camera Phone, in which a giant cherub enclosed in a neoclassical aircraft topped with coffee-cup chimneys prods at sprites buffeted by smoke from an oil-well fire, and the student prize-winning Koreas-Mansoodea Shopping Centre, a strange hint of the Korean peninsula unified by commerce, with brand names plastered over the architectural plans for the south side of the mall and a Dear Leader dominating the North.
Her technical drawing style is matched by Patrick Gilmartin, whose pencil work on mylar seems to form the plans for a product of unknown purpose. Ross Jones’s Refuge, meanwhile, has an encampment of tents set in a tundra of white paper, each one different to the next, making for a truly engrossing work. Tone Holmen provides another imagined world in Coastlines, haphazard overlays forming an impossible fjord-filled geography.
Then there’s Paul Westcombe. He offers a display of used coffee cups, their exteriors covered completely in tiny murals that look at first like idle doodles. But lean closer and you’re faced with a beautifully drawn, deeply perverse world in microcosm, full of fevered psychosexual imaginings, some that will shock even the most jaded gallery-goer.
There is some chaff in among all this wheat, sure, but overall this is a valuable survey of current drawing practice, and a show that not only presents the best of contemporary drawing but questions the nature of the art form.