Reviews
Jen'WOOD DRAWING PRIZE 2005 Glasgow School of Art. Mackintosh Gallery, until Sat 18 Feb 000
There is a solid show at the heart of this year’s tenth Jerwood Drawing Prize, so it is difficult not to trot out some half-baked cant about how drawing is still important to contemporary art practice. Many artists and art institutions have turned away from treating drawing as both foundation and backbone. This is usually to their detriment. To continue an almost reactionary line of argument then, drawing traces the borderline between the psychic and the somatic, eye and hand, inside and outside, subject and object even, so world views can be expressed or erased with one deft stroke.
That said, some of the drawings shown in the Mackintosh Gallery are banal illustration at best - drawings are overworked and too tight; skill is present but is tethered to weak and obvious subject matter. The most confident sketches in the exhibition are those that leave space for the eye and the brain to move; forms are suggested and dull narratives and landscapes are
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Continuous Build III by Ambrosine Allen
left to boring literature.
The work shown includes cartographic studies, landscapes and seascapes, traditional sub-genres of drawing, one could say, but even here there are glisters of brilliance. It would be wrong to overlook Jason Hicklin’s ‘Eigg from Sound of Rhum‘ (graphite on paper), for example, which at first glance looks like many of the other landscapes/seascapes, but his ability to say a lot by drawing very little demonstrates great talent. Light and dark, line and blurred dynamic Redonesque forms fight it out on an abstracted horizon in Vanessa Bullick’s ‘Untitled’ pencil drawing, which is the strongest example of the non-figurative work on display.
Some artists make and erase platforms, either actual zones, as in Ambrosine Allen’s ‘Continuous Build lll’, or ideological, as in Rachael Cohen’s animation ‘Six Chinese Whispers’. Others play with the media they use, taking “their pencils for a walk’ while sitting on a bus (Ann Lydiat, ‘There and Back’), or while watching the news (Penny Clark, ‘BBC 2 6pm News . . .’). The eye and mind roam together and separately in the best work on show, with line and figure merging effortlessly. (Alexander Kennedy)
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