I presently have a drawing on show in the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize. It’s one of a slowly emerging series of works under the title: ‘Displaced Portraits’.
‘Displaced Portraits’ is an ongoing series of silverpoint drawings based on people seen in photographs found in a second-hand shop in Margate.
Photographs capture the momentary presence of a person remaining still in front of a camera; my drawings are a kind of meditation on those moments which have become the displaced traces of moments people’s lives.
I’ve been focussing mostly on photographs which were taken in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Some photographs have a printers stamp with a name of a town, some have a note written on the back, but essentially these are drawings of anonymous people who are unknown to me. I wonder how our lives intersect.
Drawings take time. Drawing is an Art of ‘Trace’. Hand-drawn lines say: “Here a person was present who paid careful attention to the presence of something.” My drawings take time to emerge. They are repeatedly scratched-away and redrawn in the hope of getting to something which feels true to me. Extraneous details change in the process but always the focus is on the face and what can be imagined of the person from their look.
This series of drawings is gradually ongoing. This is very much ‘work in progress’.
The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize is currently on show at the Drawing Projects Gallery in Trowbridge until 26th April and then moves on to the Chapel Gallery in Ormskirk. The exhibition has previously been shown at Trinity Buoy Wharf, (London), The Gallery at AUB (Arts University Bournemouth) and The Royal Drawing School (London). The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize is the new incarnation of the Jerwood Drawing Prize.
