Jerwood Drawing Prize 2017

• Main Author: Hicks, Lesley
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: https://research.tees.ac.uk/en/publications/faa2dfb0-e91d-49ab-91d9-6df0bec57154; https://research.tees.ac.uk/ws/files/5969443/Image.pdf

My drawing 'Hamundarstadhals - sudur 2', was shortlisted for the prestigious Jerwood Drawing Prize 2017 (shortlisted also for the Evelyn Williams Prize, selected from exhibition). Amongst the selectors were Dr David Dibosa, University of the Arts, London and Helen Legg, Director of Spike Island. The exhibition included works by Barbara Walker and Gary Lawrence and toured to different prestigious venues across the UK beginning in the Jerwood Space London. The drawing distilled, refined and presented in a single image the essence of my previous drawing research into transforming ways in which images of landscape are made and presented. Here the subject, a landscape of Iceland, was accessed through the means of a road traffic webcam, an uncomposed and functional, low-grade image. This “found” digital image of landscape proved to be intriguingly vulnerable: visually degraded, and also defined, implicitly, as ephemeral by the utilitarian employment of technology. The ‘notionally eternal, unflinching gaze’ of the webcam, harbouring thematic ideals akin to painting tropes such as the sublime (Dan Hays) is exploited here through the particular material of graphite and the mark-making of the drawing process, a process distinctly different from painting, particularly in the ability to ‘assert the fully extended history and processes of its own making, (Deanne Petherbridge), visibly wearing its mistakes on its sleeve (Emma Dexter). The exchanges made possible by these seemingly contradictory approaches, the ordinary functioning technology and the rarefied, time consuming handmade drawing experience, have proved to be transformative, delivering a view of landscape which is particularly of our time. The whole process is evocative of the ‘epoch of space’, as articulated by Michel Foucault: ‘We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side by side, of the dispersed’.