the prison drawing project 2016
DESCRIPTION
A retrospective catalogue for The Prison Drawing Project 2016. Featuring artists Andy Black, Kate Black, Greig Burgoyne, Andrew Cheetham, Fiona Grady, Catherine Anyango Grünewald, Tracy Himsworth, Nicola Holloway, Evy Jokhova, Lucy O'Donnell, Rachel Renwick, Russell Smith, Sally Taylor, Hanna ten DoornKaat, Shelley Theodore and April Virgoe. The exhibition at Dean Road Prison, Scarborough, UK was part of Coastival 2016 and took place on 13th -14th February. An amazing 1,400 visitors came through the gates to witness this unique exploration of drawing and art.TRANSCRIPT
T H E P R I S O N P R O J E C T
1 3 T H - 1 4 T H F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6
D E A N R O A D • S C A R B O R O U G H
Facebook Search ‘Scarborough Prison Drawing Project 2016’
Twitter @team_prison
Email [email protected]
R E F L E C T I O N S O N
T H E P R I S O N D R A W I N G
P R O J E C T
B Y L U C Y O ’ D O N N E L L
This exhibition at the ‘The Old Borough of Scarborough
Jail’ or Dean Road Prison brings a variety of drawing
approaches together. The project took an open-ended
position to drawing, offering an opportunity for artists
to bring an unrestricted approach into a particularly
restricted scenario. The exploratory characteristics of
drawing frequently yield types of practice that question
its indexicality, flexibility, imaginable spaces and range
of materials. The experiences embedded with drawing’s
methods and the phenomenological characteristics of
drawing regularly bestow an emphasis to process and
play back notes of becoming. The range of approaches
encompassed by practitioners demonstrates the value
bestowed to contemporary drawing as both verb and
noun. It is somewhere here between the act and the
thing that articulates the in-between spaces thoughts
muster and dwell. Contemporary fine art drawing
undoubtedly and knowingly plays with its conceptual
elasticity or its inconclusive nature. This perspective
fractures boundaries and re-evaluates its historic canon as
a preparatory undertaking.
Can we appreciate drawing as transcript becomings?
Many, including myself, have proposed an alliance
between drawing and becoming; Berger (2005) Bryson
(2003) Naginski (2000) O’Donnell (2016) Sawdon &
Marshall (2012). If we think about the fundamentals of
drawing as composing marks it would be reasonable
to make an analogy to the notion of placement. Alan
Badiou (2006) makes insightful connections to drawing’s
activities and likens it to performance and happenings,
maintaining it as a place that dis(places) all things
in it. The Prison Drawing Project imagined drawing’s
‘placement’, its activities and yield motivational.
The bounded cell detains the contributor’s drawings
making comparable visual analyses between others
work challenging, if not impossible. The confinements of
the cell act as the place to jointly create and stage the
drawings. It is here where the cell acts as the platform
to share the drawings but holds tight to its function
as the place for detention, confinement and duration.
Equally it is the cell where an embodied dis(placement)
can intensify and distill ontological reflections of being.
Badiou aligns drawings ontological and often fragile
characteristic as a ‘movable reciprocity between existence
and inexistence’. The Prison Drawing Project brought
together a breadth of drawing practices that looked
to the sensitivities of existence and inexistence, from
mutually corporeal and speculative perspectives. These
(dis)placements for both the artists participapting in the
project and the drawings unfolding within its bounded
cells endow possibilizing.
For The Prison Drawing Project it is these becomings
that reverberate ideas initiated in the 1970’s with
Rosalind Krauss term expanded field that unfastened
drawing’s orientation, realigning concepts of medium
and environment to reject the conditions of a particular
material or mode of making. However, The Prison Drawing
Project celebrates drawing’s freedom by emphasizing
the boundary of the cell where the interrogation of
borders outlines critical edges as places ‘with play’. This
aligns perspectives more to Sawdon & Marshall who
in Hyperdrawing (2012) re-evaluate the boundaries,
conventions and materials of drawing. After talking with
the artists involved in The Prison Drawing Project the
exchange between the drawing and its bounded cell
was stimulating. This (dis)placement offered disclosure
to divulge the in-between spaces thoughts muster and
dwell. And any conventional or historic notions of drawing
as a preparatory activity makes me wonder... preparing for
what if we have willingly displaced resolute certainty?
Artists are brought together led by Tracy Himsworth,
Kate Black, Andy Black, Andrew Cheetham, Sally Taylor
and myself who together intended the project’s call for
applications as an opportunity for practitioners to use
the exchange between the drawing and its bounded
dwelling as a motivating catalyst. I had the privilege to
be a part of the selection process and write reflections for
the catalogue.
Photo Credit: Mike Ambler ([email protected])
These written reflections group the contributors for
discussion. Overarching to this arrangement is the play
between interior/exterior spaces, material sensibilities,
and the significance of space and sequence. A review of
imagined spaces follows this and the reflections close
with a focus upon performance. Contributors Catherine
Anyango, Andy Black, Russell Smith and Evy Jokhova
all tease out the dynamics between the inside and
outside spaces of the prison in their work. Catherine
Anyango’s drawings look towards the crimes that dictate
incarceration. For the project a large drawing covers the
walls depicting a crime scene. She thinks about the cell as
defined by the exterior, where the detention is due to the
acts carried out beyond its walls. ‘Exterior crime scenes
demand the understanding of a space that is at the limit
of our knowledge. They are often hinterlands - it is telling
that the murders by Brady and Hindley are known as
the Moors murders.’ For Andy Black his drawings utilize
a type of scripted index influenced by the landscape or
manifestations associated to plants or architecture. This
index acts as ‘players’ that are organised into a pictorial
space where the perspective acts as an infinite panorama
apprehended in the paper’s whiteness. The space in the
drawing hovers between the recognisable and peculiar,
offering unearthly gardens to dwell. For the prison the
idea of panorama is re-examined where the cell walls
perform as a drawing support. This plays a new dynamic
that possess the space of the garden as an aspiration
or vision of the cell’s inhabitant. Russell Smith works
with similar preoccupations for the project, using it as
an opportunity to shift the exterior into the interior. His
idyllic landscape acts as a gesture of transformation
where the drawing brings an opening for reflection into
a space that breaks its regime. The interpretation of the
work is shaped by its liminal qualities performing as a
virtual space to dwell similar to a mirage or a window
none the less artificial in its illusion. Evy Jokhova’s practice
can be comprehended as fundamentally expanded.
Working with a range of materials including paint,
masking tape, clay, charcoal and collage she made her
drawing on site responding to the space of the cell.
This work brings together physical and philosophical
experiences of being. It anticipates the psychological
influences of the space and speculates upon cultivated
disorders adopted by the confinement and limited
movement.
In both April Virgoe’s and Nicola Holloway’s approach’s
they contemplate drawings delicate material sensibilities.
For April Virgoe her interests consider spaces of order
and disorder, reality and fiction. After seeing drawings
stenciled by soldiers on the barracks ceiling at Berwick-
upon-Tweed Museum, her work for the project restages
fumage drawings, speaking of these messages left by the
soldiers. These fragile drawings tell of the soldiers desire
to trace their presence echoing the yearning embedded
in Pliny’s Shadow. However, by drawing stairs with the
smoke April Virgoe contradicts the narrative of Pliny’s
Shadow to mark out or reaffirm presence, instead she
conjures an exit route offering the incarcerated chance
to break from the stronghold. These drawings evoke the
idea that they can live out fantasies and ultimately breach
the cell boundaries. Nicola Holloway’s work for the project
also acknowledges drawing’s fragility. By responding to
the space of the cell she meticulously follows and fills the
cracks and textured surfaces of the walls by repeatedly
drawing dots. This work intensifies our awareness of time,
where the marked dots build in mass as ‘notations’ acting
out the unseen narratives of the site. The delicate dotted
insertions mark out activities passed, drawing them forth
and resuming them back into the present. This makes
for a sensual and suggestive process that acknowledges
both the temporal nature of drawing and the durational
activity undertaken in making the work.
Rachael Renwick’s work contemplates the idea of space,
freedom and sequence, working within a grid depicting
drawn knots. The drawing process she works with sets
particular rules. However, the rules in this instance are
managed to liberate any systematic agenda by collecting
open-ended statements or questions and using these
as types of instructions to alter her drawing approach.
Fiona Grady also unites notions of space and sequence,
making references to marked tallies to map out duration.
This process is likely to evoke references to prisoners
or incarceration however here the use of egg tempera
evokes references to frescos, or icons painted on church
walls. The cell takes on a certain ambience, created from
the light reflecting onto the tallies where a contemplative
or even peaceful space emerges.
Kate Black, Andrew Cheetham, Shelley Theodore and
Sally Taylor all worked in the imagined space drawing
can reveal. These artists all referenced the ‘body’ within
the cell, opening up the space of both the cell and that
of drawing as one of possibilizing. Kate Black’s drawings
are a place for the unpredictable. They do not depict
encounters from our everyday; rather bestow a place for
conjured scenarios. Here drawing becomes a place to
literally play in the wonderful where anything is possible.
Pasted onto the cell walls her drawings offer images of
tunnelling prisoners, or potholers maybe even miners?
These figures tell tales of escape routes in their burrowed
labyrinth and the cell is literally extended, acting as
both an opening to expose and project desire. Andrew
Cheetham’s drawing depicts a figure or character that
we assume may once have inhabited the cell. For the
viewer entering the low-lit cell the prospect to meet
the occupant infers a threat and the feeling of unease
intensifies. The drawing literally transfers its former inmate
back into the cell where an encounter with the past is
re-projected into the present. Sally Taylor’s contribution
also works with the idea of a re-imagined space. Her
practice is generated in a series that employs repeated
motives that frequently depict heads. These talk of a serial
discourse, which virtually chatter amongst themselves.
For the Prison Project she brings numerous drawings
together indicative of the workings of her studio. Here
the drawings reside in the space/studio nodding to its
confines as a constricted domain. Shelley Theodore
is concerned with the act of looking and often draws
attention to over-looked aspects of lived experiences. For
the Prison Project she brings together memories of her
grandfather who was captured in the Second World War.
The work brings together memories, gathered images
and conversations held across an ironing board.
Myself, Greig Burgoyne, Hanna Ten Doornkaat and Tracy
Himsworth all work with drawing’s live or durational
qualities, clustered here for our shared preoccupations
with performance. For Greig Burgoyne his performance
was documented and shown as video projected back into
the cell. The work titled Bad drawing/paper cell plays in
the absurd and sets the impossible... to escape from the
reality of the cell. He covers the walls with paper in a bid
to negate its restraints, explaining “In its attempts to extol
drawing as an act of covering (like shading) the space
Bad drawing/paper cell will test drawing paradoxically as
a means to open up and liberate oneself from the space
albeit during the process of trying to cover the space and
being potentially submerged by the paper as a result”. In
my own work I drew a parallel between the roles of the
paper drawing support and that of the enclosed prison
cell, as joint restricted spaces where activities are always
conscious of their boundaries. The work incorporates
explorations from my current research where the
inscriptive and expressive characteristics of drawing and
writing are acknowledged and fused to become drawing/
writing. This method is described as a vocative hybrid, and
argued as creating opportunities for wonder. It is these
navigations, or wonderings that become the focus for the
project where the pages of my PhD thesis are repetitively
redrafted. Within its flat boundaries the paper becomes
a type of constituent where thoughts are caught, overlaid
and replayed. Limited by the boundary the sustained
redrafting reiterates ideas rather than filters them and a
blended ambiguous mass of information is created. These
scripted hybrids are literally translated and throughout
the show were performed. This vocative expression is
directed from the paper to become sounded. This eludes
the imposed limits where the sounded acts mark out
the intentions and set forth new expressions. Hanna Ten
Doornkaat’s performance work for the Prison Project is
durational and autobiographic. She repeatedly writes
the word me that references yet masks the maker by its
repetitive notations. The walls of the cell are likened to
the enclosure of a cave where the process can be seen
as drawing oneself out and notes the primal activity of
drawing that mutually marks presence and constructs
narrative. Tracy Himsworth employs and magnifies
drawings physical gestures, performing a walk that is
intended to open a dialogue with the surroundings. These
‘performed’ drawings are utilised to make discoveries
within the space, to encounter and reside within it.
Tracy records the lines she walks as both two and three-
dimensional drawings. For The Prison Drawing Project
her explorations of the prison were mapped and the
configuration of the rectangular shapes were recorded.
These drawings are reworked, physically charted into
three-dimensional lines that occupy the cell proposing
a compressed experience of the walk for others to enter.
Certain areas of the three-dimensional drawings were
covered with an ultramarine paint pigment. This addition
of intense colour created added reverberations of
spatial divisions that questioned tangible and boundary
perceptions
Photo Credit: Mike Ambler ([email protected])
0 0 0 1A N D Y
B L A C K
TH
E
IN
MA
TE
S
0 0 0 2K A T E
B L A C K
0 0 0 3G R E I G
B U R G O Y N E
0 0 0 4A N D R E W
C H E E T H A M
0 0 0 5F I O N A
G R A D Y
0 0 0 6C A T H E R I N E
A N Y A N G O
G R ü N E W A L D
0 0 0 7T R A C Y
H I M S W O R T H
0 0 0 8N I C O L A
H O L L O W A Y
0 0 0 9E V Y
J O K H O V A
0 0 1 0L U C Y
O ’ D O N N E L L
0 0 1 1R A C H E L
R E N W I C K
0 0 1 2R U S S E L L
S M I T H
0 0 1 3S A L L Y
T A Y L O R
0 0 1 4H A N N A
T E N
D O O R N K A A T
0 0 1 5S H E L L E Y
T H E O D O R E
0 0 1 6A P R I L
V I R G O E
I have drawings of around a hundred forms collected
together in a small book. Some of these forms are objects
from the landscape – trees, bushes, rocks, mountains,
lakes. Some are reminiscent of topiary or architecture.
Others are sharp-edged and geometric or more
amorphous and blobby. All the forms are real in that they
obey gravity and are rooted to the ground. These forms (to
steal Philip Guston’s idea) are my alphabet. These provide
the material of a series of drawings that at the moment
seems limitless.
There are other constants too: I work in black and white;
the forms are plotted onto perspectival grid so that we
have an aerial viewpoint over a territory that recedes deep
into the distance but has no horizon; a strong evening
light illuminates the drawing so that each form casts a
long dark shadow.
In the studio, with these set constraints and door shut to
other variables, I construct drawings of imagined exterior
spaces. I think of them as drawings of gardens. Some are
systematically planned with formal, abstract patterns.
Others are allowed to become overgrown where the
forms, like weeds, multiply and compete for space.
In making the drawings the forms’ contrasts of shape,
tone, texture and their ambiguity of scale demand my
attention. Once completed, I can look down to survey
a whole constructed world. I imagine being down on
the ground exploring the pockets of space and paths
between the details.
More recently I’ve begun making wall drawings that begin
to explore other spatial possibilities – not only an increase
in scale but also how the drawings might be configured
to a specific three dimensional space.
A N D Y B L A C K
0 0 0 1
Website andyblackart.com
My drawings illustrate an internal world depicting scenes
from an invented, strange soap opera. Signs, symbols and
shapes transport characters into uncanny and surreal
worlds; they are portals into narratives that I imagine to
be like ‘Coronation Street’ on acid. This drawing responds
to the particular context of the cell. Beneath the ground,
men (miners, pot-holers or escapees) dig tunnels like
moles, sometimes getting stuck or lodged beneath the
surface trying to find a way out of here.
K A T E B L A C K
0 0 0 2
Email [email protected]
Twitter @KateBlackUK
Website kateblackillustration.co.uk
‘Only when we move do we see the chains’Rosa Luxemburg
Bad drawing / paper cell is a site specific drawing
performance presented as a film grafted onto the space
that is the cell. It takes the notion of drawing as a form
of covering and measurement, into an immersive act
of attempted liberation. Measuring, using rolls of paper,
the film chronicles what could be seen as a bad day
wallpapering a space, no assistants, paste or ladders
just a desire to cover and negate the cell. Only stopping
when exhausted, Burgoyne offers the viewer a spectacle
of endurance undaunted by a failure doomed from the
start. In his attempts to be free of the cell, he is potentially
submerged in the paper as a result. The outcome is a film
projected across the cell walls that unites the tension
between the restricted, solid space with a fluidity and
potential of the performative act. Consequently, the
grounded and static of the prison cell could in doubt and
liberation may indeed be possible.
In his work Burgoyne combines office materials ranging
from post-it notes to highlighter pens and photocopy
paper, alongside process led, rule based repetition,
endurance, accumulation and duration. Taking anomalies
of the space, he seeks to test or expand alternative body/
site relations with regard to space and thinking. The
results in the form of wall drawing, films, performances
and installations, propose new dialogues and frameworks
that aim to generate a condition of becoming, translation
and flux instead of stasis; a site of experience rather than
merely location.
Greig Burgoyne was born in Glasgow, studied at the HAK
Vienna and MA painting Royal College of Art London.
Recent Solo projects include Scapelands DrawingBox
Belgium; WhiteNoise Centre for Recent Drawing London;
Gapfillers Briggait project spaces 1+2 Wasps studios
Glasgow; Apparatus L’Escaut Architectures Brussels;
FAX Karst Plymouth (Curated by The Drawing centre
New York); OMON RA the drawing project IADT Dublin.
Forthcoming projects in 2016 include WhiteNoise the
book published by Marmalade visual theory; La Brasserie
Centre D’art Contemporain Fonquevillers France; Patricia
Fleming Glasgow; La Confection Idéale Tourcoing France
G R E I G B U R G O Y N E
0 0 0 3
Email [email protected]
Twitter @greigburgoyne
YouTube Greig Burgoyne
Website greigburgoyne.com
watch the video
My paintings and drawings could be described as
documentary as I prefer to work from life. For the Prison
Drawing Project I spent several days working in one of
the cells, drawing. The figure happens to be me because
I was the only model available. It is not intended as a self-
portrait but as a presence, a sense of someone who once
occupied the space.
Andrew Cheetham (born 1971, Heywood, Lancashire)
studied Art at Manchester Polytechnic, Liverpool John
Moores University and Central St. Martins College of Art.
Andrew has been recording the Scarborough Fishing
Industry since 2000 renting a Net Loft on the harbour as
a studio and accompanying the Fishermen out to sea.
Throughout this time the sea has been a constant in his
work.
He has been Artist-in-Residence at Knaresborough
Castle and in Rosedale on the North York Moors. Recent
exhibitions include ‘Art and Yorkshire: From Turner to
Hockney’, Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate.
A N D R E W C H E E T H A M
0 0 0 4
Website andrewcheetham.com
Fiona Grady creates large site-responsive drawings
on walls, windows and floors using sequences of
dispersing geometric shapes. Her practice recognizes the
relationship between architecture, installation art and
decoration; often using traditional mediums in a modern
context. She plays with light, surface and scale; each piece
changes with the light of day emphasizing the passing of
time and the ephemeral nature of the work.
For the Prison Drawing Project the artist will create
‘Counting the Days’ an immersive wall drawing in one of
the prison cells. This drawing will reference the romantic
notion of a prisoner scratching a tally of the days spent in
confinement. Composed from fragile lines of glossy paint,
applied directly onto the walls, the colours will brighten
when reflecting light and create a restful ambiance.
Her artwork will investigate the ability of geometry to
transform a space; the lines will seemingly escape their
setting.
Fiona Grady (born 1984, Leeds) studied BA Fine Art at the
University of Wales In Cardiff (UWIC) 2004-2007 before
completing as Masters degree in Fine Art at Wimbledon
School of Art (UAL) 2010- 2011. Grady has been short-
listed for several printmaking prizes including Neo-print
Prize 2014, Bainbridge Open 2012 and Clifford Chance’s
Survey of MA printmaking 2011. Her public commissions
include Deptford Rail Station, Beacons Music Festival,
Leeds Town Hall and Jealous Gallery Rooftop Mural
Project. She has had recent solo exhibitions ‘Fields
of Light’ at Barbican Arts Trust (2014) and ‘Tempered
Deflections’ (2015) at Footfall Arts, London. Her work is
owned in private and public collections.
F I O N A G R A D Y
0 0 0 5
Instagram @fiona_grady
Twitter @fiona_grady
Website fionagrady.co.uk
The Phantom of The Forest
This work responds to the idea of a prison cell as an
interior that is defined by an exterior. The prisoner is in
this space because of acts committed outside of it, and
also usually wishes to be outside it. The title refers to the
fugitive and murderer Barry Prudom who evaded capture
for 18 days in 1982 in Dalby forest near Scarborough.
Exterior crime scenes demand the understanding of
a space that is at the limit of our knowledge. They are
often hinterlands - it is telling that the murders by
Brady and Hindley are known as the Moors murders.
The act of crime, horrific enough, is also made mentally
unnavigable, and the unknown is always a source of fear
or dread. Crime collapses borders between inside and
outside - it intrudes into the home, or it scatters the home
outside. The drawing recreates this inversion of interior
and exterior space, and the feeling of being confronted
with a vast exterior when entering a tiny cell creates a
cognitive dissonance.
Catherine Anyango Grünewald is a Swedish/Kenyan artist
and a Tutor in Visual Research at the Royal College of
Art She studied at Central Saint Martins and the Royal
College of Art, followed by a Masters in Modern Literature
at UCL. She has published, lectured and exhibited
internationally and is represented by the Riflemaker
gallery. In 2010 her graphic novel adaptation of Heart of Darkness was awarded the Observer’s Graphic Novel of
the Month.
Research areas include drawing and its relationship to
power, horror and crime and femininity, domesticity and
the abject. She is interested in the physical manifestation
of emotional phenomena and the emotional disruption
of public and private space.
C A T H E R I N EA N Y A N G O
G R ü N E W A L D
0 0 0 6
Website catherine-anyango.com
Line as fact
Documentation
Record
Movement
Place
Time
Measurement
The act of drawing is the central concern in my work, it
is a way of opening up a dialogue between myself the
things and places around me. I use drawing as a form of
discovery and documentation, the sketch map becomes
a mental record of my movement through interior and
exterior spaces. Using self imposed rules I record the lines
I walk by creating graphic two and three dimensional line
drawings.
In this piece of work I mapped my movements around
the prison, getting to know the space, I found myself
repeatedly walking a rectangular shape. These simple
facts and linear measurements of my activity now
take the form of a three dimensional drawing that
is habitable. A space for you, the viewer, now to walk
through.
T R A C Y H I M S W O R T H
0 0 0 7
Email [email protected]
Website tracyhimsworth.com
My works seek to “find form” within historically charged
spaces, to trace the historic residue of site, in which,
transient memories can emerge from the space. Through
the creation of an environment that unites feelings of
experience, the drawings seek to reveal hidden narratives
from the historical residue of walls, in this instance the
cell walls, in which experience and the ‘human trace’
emerge.
My drawings have a fluid aspect to them, within them,
nothing is defined. They make us aware of the desire to
name what we are seeing. I have become interested in
this idea of ambiguity within a piece of work, as, without
ambiguity, it can be suggested that an artwork lacks
depth. Through this added level of ambiguity, a piece of
work can be read on many different levels, it requires us
to actively use our own perceptions, ideas, and judgments
to find meaning.
The repetition within the works is not a means of
deadening it, but rather to heighten the viewing
experience, just as the material trace is not opposed
by notions of infinity, but rather it is rescued by it.
Rather than constraining difference though the act of
repetition through a similar variable, the act of repetition
exacerbates the maximum difference, with no two
organic surface responses being the same, leading to
an increase of variable outcomes. Each work is a unique
response to its architectural environment.
N I C O L A H O L L O W A Y
0 0 0 8
Instagram @nicolahollowayart
Website nicolaholloway.com
Evy Jokhova is a multi disciplinary artist whose practice
engages with dialogue and relationships between Social
anthropology, Architecture, Philosophy and Art. Working
with drawing, painting, installation, photography, film,
participatory events and artist books, Jokhova aims to
bridge gaps between these fields and their inherent
hierarchical structures creating work in the expanded
context of interdisciplinary research projects.
Born in Switzerland to Russian parents, Jokhova lived in
Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, Austria and Estonia before
moving to London, UK where she currently lives and
works. Her multi cultural background and exposure to
diverse social and political structures in altering states of
flux and stability form the backbone of Jokhova’s research
and practice.
In 2013 Jokhova completed MA in Political
Communications, Goldsmiths College with an
anthropological research project on media influences and
the sense of political belonging in Soviet and post-Soviet
Russia; and in 2011 she completed an MA in Fine Art,
Royal College of Art with a final thesis on the ontological
question of being in architectural space.
Her practice is research driven by investigations into
relationships between things, the creation of social
systems, and how social behaviour can be altered through
architectural construction, with reference to the post-
Cartesian ontological question of being in space (M.
Heidegger, J-L. Nancy, Ian James, M. Foucault) and the
relationship between building, body and mind (Bertrand
Russell, Bill Hillier, Vitruvius). Jokhova’s projects are often
supported by anthropological fieldwork and interviews.
Engaging with the everyday as well as possible and
impossible futures as imagined by architects, city
planners, historians and politicians, Jokhova surveys
the disparity between plan and reality using a paired
down aesthetic of a muted palette, creating objects
of an ambiguous materiality, drawing into landscape
and architectural space. Exploring social narratives
and remembered ‘truths’, Jokhova questions her own
subjective role in and relationship to society, history,
landscape and architecture.
E V Y J O K H O V A
0 0 0 9
Twitter @EvyJokhova
Website evyjokhova.co.uk
My practice interrogates the possibilities of drawing
as both a process and an outcome. Looking towards
material as a type of device that carries particular
interpretations, I work to revisit supposed conventions
and expectations of drawing to test its conceptual
elasticity. For the Prison Project I have focused upon the
parallel roles of the paper drawing support and that of
the enclosed prison cell as jointly restricted spaces where
activities are always conscious of their boundaries.
This work incorporates explorations from my practice-led
PhD that looked towards the inscriptive and expressive
parallels of drawing and writing, becoming drawing/
writing. This research identified wonder as a crucial
occurrence to review the potential of a drawing/writing
hybrid as poetic, where by looking and reading become
united and challenge syntactical rules to make alternative
interpretations. This opens new possibilities for the poetic
inscriptions to become sounded and performed.
For the Prison Project the drawing/writing inscriptions
and their wondering navigation(s) become the focus
of the work. By repeatedly redrafting the pages of my
thesis, the paper becomes a type of constituent where
thoughts are caught, overlaid and replayed within its flat
boundaries. This process makes reference to the confined
space of both the page and the cell as a limited place
to play out thinking. This concept informs the process
of redrafting, as a process that to an extent recovers its
position from ambiguity, however in this instance creates
a blended mass of information. Here the sustained
redrafting obliterates the typed text and image, drawing
out an alternative marked semiosis. During the exhibition
these drawing/writing hybrid works will be performed as
live rephrased gestures.
L U C Y O ’ D O N N E L L
0 0 1 0
York St.John’s University Profile bit.ly/1R3DCDk
Loughborough Project Space bit.ly/1LMN5wu
My work is primarily centred on drawing and repetitive
mark making, using a range of media and often involving
found or pre-marked materials. In switching between
abstraction and representation simultaneously, I hope to
emphasise the significance of process and materials over
subject matter.
I am interested in the reaction to self imposed rules or
rituals as part of the making process and aim to explore
the balance between intuition and control as a response
to such invented structures. I consider the grid to be a
visual representation of the rule or structure on which
my work is based and often use this framework as a
foundation for my drawings.
Within my most recent work I have started to explore
themes of dialogue between different processes or
repetitive doodling which I refer to as ‘visual phrases’.
These interactions, whilst dictated by an invented system,
playfully investigate the intrinsic qualities of the materials
and techniques being employed, how they attack or repel
one another, and also how they can be manipulated to do
what is unexpected of them. These drawn conversations
seek to formalise and add a sense of directness to the
confusing territory of human communication from where
they take inspiration.
R A C H E L R E N W I C K
0 0 1 1
Website rachelrenwick.co.uk
“Confinement, regulation and excessive work have no effect but to develop in these men profound hatred, a thirst for forbidden enjoyment, and frightful recalcitration” - Dostoyevsky
The original intention of a prison cell is as a habitable
space designed to oppress its occupant and enforce
reformation. This archaic impression is what I am
challenging with my work; I want to turn the cell into a
place of tranquil serenity. I am intending to achieve this
through the process of drawing a picturesque landscape
of mountains captured in the South of France onto the
walls of the cell.
The stereotypical thought of a prisoner in a prison cell
is of a human being enclosed behind bars, subverting
this premise; I have drawn the serene imagery in lines
to represent the stereotypical barred entrapment but
again juxtaposing the reality of a prisoners experience
behind said bars, using the bars to create the tranquil
imagery, instead of creating imagery of oppression. When
experienced I found the imagery to be very meditative
and by using it, hope to turn the cell into a place of
reflection. Thus creating a forbidden enjoyment to be
experienced by the installation visitors, to contrast with
the profound hatred this cell would have experienced
from its original inhabitants.
R U S S E L L S M I T H
0 0 1 2
Email [email protected]
My drawings affirm a desire to understand more about
human relationships, specifically my own interaction with
others. They are equally about forming a balance between
formal concerns in relation to the communication
of emotional resonance. Recent work has developed
into an investigation of the dynamics of social groups
– particularly how hierarchies emerge, how roles are
assumed and behaviours are managed. The work aims
to investigate these processes that appear to be rooted
simultaneously in latent predispositions; revealing
‘unknown’ and unpredictable subjective experiences.
Recurring motifs of triangles and ‘smiling mouths’ aim
to explore Louise Bourgeois’ statement ‘triangles mean
danger’ alongside social constructs surrounding the
unsaid and non-verbal interaction.
Sally Taylor (b. 1977, Bury, Lancashire) studied BA Fine Art:
Practice & Theory (1995-98), MA Studio Practice (1999-
2000) Lancaster University. Selected group exhibitions
include: London Art Fair, Rabley Contemporary, London
(2016, 2015), To Draw is to be Human, Crescent Arts,
Scarborough, South Square Gallery, Bradford (2015),
Sketchbook Today, University of Northampton (2015),
Jerwood Drawing Prize 2014 ‘Highly Commended’,
Jerwood Space, London and UK tour (2014-15), Derwent
Art Prize 2014, Mall Galleries, London (2014), Paint Like
You Mean It, Interview Room 11, Edinburgh (2014), Sketch
2013, Rabley Contemporary Drawing Centre, Wiltshire
and UK tour (2013-14). Solo exhibitions include: Confused
Heads, Duckett and Jeffreys, North Yorkshire (2013), All Say
The Same, Ryedale Folk Museum, North Yorkshire (2011),
Marks and Mouths, PS2, MIMA – Middlesbrough Institute
of Modern Art (2010-11). Work included in Drawing Paper
#6, co-curated with Tate Liverpool to coincide with the
Liverpool Biennial (2012), Jerwood Drawing Prize 2011,
2009, 2004, Afternoon Tea, 54th Venice Biennale with WW
Gallery, London (2011). Recently awarded Grants for the
Arts funding to work with leading practitioners / curators
in contemporary drawing. She is a Lecturer at York St
John University and lives and works in North Yorkshire.
S A L L Y T A Y L O R
0 0 1 3
FROZEN TIME
A self portrait by Hanna ten Doornkaat is a durational
drawing combining concept and experimental process
By writing and rewriting the word ‘me’ over and over
again onto the walls of the cell until both the walls and
the word ‘me’ are completely obscured the cell becomes
the artist and the artist becomes the cell. Those very walls
become a metaphor for the artist’s skin and a self-portrait
is written/drawn onto and into the cell.
Confinement to a prison cell or ‘doing time’ means that
the passage of time, of the days, weeks, months, years is
‘frozen time’. The only thing to do is to claim the space
and by doing so make it the prisoner’s/artist’s own.
The writing/drawing on the wall thus becomes a
substitute for the self and when the time has been done
it is returned to its original blank/timeless state.
The philosopher Jean Paul Sartre claimed that man is
a creature haunted by a vision of completion but the
message here when taking Buddhist ideology as a
guidance is that nothing is permanent and all things are
in flux and only temporary, a plateau but not a summit. It
makes us think of what, if anything, makes us or anything
permanent. Neither our domination of the world, nor
our privileged place in the community, nor our sense of
status, nothing is permanent.
H A N N AT E N D O O R N K A A T
0 0 1 4
Website tendoornkaat.co.uk
Title: Reverse
My current practice includes drawing, collage,
photography and film. What brings the work together is
concern with the ‘act of looking’ as a means of training
attention on my own experience and indirectly the
viewing experience. The main focus for this attention
is to bring overlooked aspects of lived experience into
view and to translate experiences that are perhaps
unconscious in part. I have also found that obscuring the
image can draw attention to what has been overlooked.
A postcard of a suited female mannequin photographed
from behind was my starting point for this project. The
1940’s style fashion reminded me of my grandmother’s
wardrobe. (Vivienne Westwood Archive, V&A Museum)
I re-photographed and framed the image in reverse
revealing the inside of the frame. I made 100 photocopies
of this picture and its frame in red ink and pressed each
print with an iron.
I thought of my grandfather in Changi Prison Singapore
during the Second World War. He was an Australian
soldier captured by the Japanese. His story was
communicated to me by conversations with my mother
across an ironing board during my childhood. He did not
come back from the war. I thought of my mother’s tears
and of her anguish. These themes of psychological and
individual isolation and loss resonate within the work and
within the Dean Road installation.
S H E L L E Y T H E O D O R E
0 0 1 5
Twitter @shelleytheodore
Website axisweb.org/p/shelleytheodore
Some years ago I visited the barracks at Berwick upon
Tweed and I was struck by the drawings and messages
that had been stencilled onto the ceiling by soldiers.
These drawings were made by holding a flame beneath
the stencil, leaving a sooty deposit. The drawings are
crude, small and simplistic - but they are striking and
carry an emotional charge.
These drawings are evidence of the human need to leave
a trace, to make something as fleeting as smoke remain
a little longer. An attempt to fix or mark time, to hold
time in place as the days, weeks and months slip by. With
an elegant resignation to the limits of the materials at
hand, the soldiers found distraction and perhaps escape.
The soot is as ephemeral as its source, and the resulting
drawings are often indistinct, dreamlike and, until fixed,
can disappear with a touch.
This series of small scale smoke stencil, or fumage,
drawings are derived from architectural spaces, but barely
recognisable, and read more as fantastical; architecture
of the mind rather than the world. This series of drawings
focuses on details such as stairs and windows – places of
transition and escape, exits and entrances that could take
you outside or on a labyrinthine journey back to where
you began.
A P R I L V I R G O E
0 0 1 6
Twitter @AprilVirgoe
Website axisweb.org/p/aprilvirgoe
On behalf of the Prison Drawing Project, I would like to thank
the following individuals and organisations for their help and
support.
Wendy Holroyd and the Create team
Rowena Marsden, James Atthews andScarborough Borough Council
Arts Council England
Holly and Klaire Jamsworth • Design and catering
Jon Wooton • Electrical services
Phil Grundon • Catalogue Design
Mike Ambler • Photography
Andrew Cheetham • Artist photography and technician
Andy Black • Social media and administration
Kate Black • Coordination and management of the project
with Tracy Himsworth
Dr Lucy O’Donnell • Introduction
All the amazing artists who made this project happen!
Finally and not least, the 1,400 visitors.
Tracy Himsworth • Lead artist
March 2016