The 2020 Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize Awards were announced last week during an online ceremony to coincide with the exhibition of 71 drawings by artists, architects and designers also launching online due to the current COVID-19 restrictions.
First Prize of £8,000 was awarded to M.Lohrum, whose performative and collaborative drawing You are It challenges the individual notion of authorship, while the Second Prize, worth £5,000, was awarded to Nancy Haslam-Chance for her series of Caring Drawings. Ayeshah Zolghadr received the Student Award of £2,000, for Circling the Square I, and the £2,000 Working Drawing Award went to Ben Johnson for his meticulously detailed Scrovegni Chapel Worksheet.
Here we take a look at some of the works by a-n members selected for the show, which has already toured to Drawing Projects UK in Trowbridge and Cooper Gallery in Dundee.
Nicola Grellier’s No Backbone is one of a year-long series of 366 drawings made from midsummer 2019 to midsummer 2020 which explore “physical touch, habitual behaviour, ageing and deterioration, the difficulties and absurdities of communication and language, human relationships and, occasionally, something about politicians”.
“Alluding to both momentous and intimate experience, the works and their titles employ pathos and humour to describe serious subjects in what turned out to be the weirdest of years”, says Grellier, who exhibited the drawings in their entirety at SVA Gallery in October 2020 alongside a book of 285 drawings titled ’TODAY’
Stroud-based Grellier, who is an associate artist at Bricks Bristol and Flooring Collective, began a new year of drawings on 1 December 2020 and posts these daily on Instagram.
Demeter Dykes lives and works in Dorset. Her practice revolves around making with materials that are intrinsic to her everyday life.
For the shortlisted work in Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize waste paper from the shredder, made up of old bills and envelopes, has been reordered and reconstructed in a measured process of application. Shredding paper results in the material getting bigger, it takes up more space, it has volume. Having produced this mountain of material she felt compelled to put it back together in some way. Each shred has been laid down as an act of devotion at odds with the banality of the material.
Demeter is a funded participating installation artist for Bournemouth Emerging Arts Fringe 2020 (postponed to 2021) as part of Artists for Affect Collective. She is also a lecturer at Arts University Bournemouth.
Iain Andrews is a painter based in Manchester, where he also works as an art psychotherapist. His drawing Breath Drawing XIX takes the form a collaborative project made with his father-in-law during lockdown that investigates the idea of breath, both as a signifier of life but also as the carrier of contagion.
Andrews comments: “Thoughts of incense burnt during prayer or Victorian ghost photography, where the unseen spirits of the dead are supposedly given shape and form also formed part of the motivation for this project.”
His exhibition ‘Thing Worlds’ opens at Art Spot Korin in Kyoto, Japan, 23 February – 7 March 2021.
Simon Brewster is based in Acton, west London. His works are mostly small and intimate, fragile objects, made with accessible, everyday materials and crudely crafted. Many of his works are intended to counterpoint (and sometimes parody) our contemporary, slick, digital world.
Brewster explains: “I’m concerned with issues about the act of making and showing art, and its uncomfortable relationship with money. In an age of materialism, mass production, and a climate crisis, this takes on a greater significance. The nature of the materials and scale of the work is intended to be ‘non-corporate’ – human hand size; not suitable for the ‘Head Office foyer’.
Kay McCrann is currently based between London, Portsmouth and The Isle of Wight. Her drawings are part of a series of works investigating how to explore the human-insect entanglement of a beetle landing on a finger through embodied drawing techniques such as blind line drawing.
She comments: “I used the live photo setting on an iPhone to record the experience, which afforded reflection and allowed the disruption of the memory and visual and non-visual information through play. An unpredictable and fleeting experience can now be discussed, shared, relived, explored and embedded through drawing, whilst at the same time promoting an important discussion on the role of the smart phone within individual creative natural history enquiry and drawing practice.”
The drawings aim to promote contemporary natural history enquiry as being a personal creative and investigative practice experienced between human and non-human within a specific place and time.
McCrann is currently completing a PhD by practice with Portsmouth University ‘Minibeasts, mark-making and me: Contemporary embodied drawing approaches to natural history enquiry’. She has a solo research drawing exhibition at The Clayden Gallery, Quay Arts, Newport Isle of Wight, 24 July – 7 August 2021.
Cardiff based artist Camilla Brueton’s practice interrogates our experience of place, reflecting on architecture, landscape, movement and shifting perspectives.
Drawing is at the core of her practice – offering her a way of making sense of the world. Research is done out in the field, in the studio and whilst in transit. The results are large drawings that connect distant places, and small works on paper, ‘visual essays’ combining text and images, printmaking and spoken word.
Brueton is showing Lines#1 at the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2020. This is one of a small series of pencil drawings she made of the horizon on the East Scottish coast whilst on residency at Hospitalfield, Arbroath. The work is shown in its original sketchbook, inside a display case expanding on the themes of space, framing and location that exist within the drawing.
Brueton will be exhibiting in The Wales Contemporary in Milford Haven, at Gallery@OXO in London at the end of February 2021.
Ruth Richmond lives on a small sheep farm in Suffolk. Her work 5 Lockdown Soul Poles features random reductive lines drawn with a hot wire into a hazel pole, which captures the thoughts, walks and emotions of her family members during the first Covid-19 Lockdown.
As a grouping they suggest a family, derived from the same genus but with individual characteristics identified by the natural structure of the pole and also of the unique drawn tracings of lines and spaces. Richmond suggests the burnt umber is bruising depicting the knocks in life, and the interruption of the good times when we are needing support and rigorous determination to overcome them. Chalk paint in the spaces allows the stem to breathe and to continue its cyclical journey through to decomposition and suggests a balance of power between the whites, lights and darks.
Rae Fior Lowe’s work explores our understanding of space, in particular the urban landscape, in relation to time and sunlight. She uses science as a craft and craft as a means to manifest scientific theories, often taking the form of site-specific, time-based installations and interventions that engage with public or semi-public space. Diagrammatic drawings, both document and explain the relationship that is created between the viewer, the piece and its immediate location and the ‘149.6 million km stretch between them and the sun’.
Lowe is currently working on a memorial sculpture for the rose garden at Kingsley Hall Community Centre, Dagenham.
Images:
1. Nicola Grellier, No Backbone 229, collage and ink on paper, 2020
2. Demeter Dykes, Parting, shredded paper on graph paper, 62x43cm
3. Iain Andrews, Breath Drawing XIX
4. Simon Brewster, Arms Race, drawing machine, adapted clockwork music box motor, plastic models and spool, thread, steel box, ink on cartridge paper, 20x35x7cm, 2020
5. Kay McCrann, Beetle walking along finger live photo on bounce 12/13
6. Camilla Brueton, Lines#1
7. Ruth Richmond, 5 Lockdown Soul Poles
8. Rae Fior Lowe, 10:00 – 10:24 & 14:03 – 14:27, 25/03/2019. Light Redirected – Ricochets Twice Along a Course (I) From the fourth of A Light Scattering of 6 Particles. (2018-2019), Durational drawing, gold leaf, screen print on paper. 45 x 70 cm
