One of my drawings has made it through to the second stage of the selection process for the 2021 Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize.
‘Displaced Portrait No16 (woman from Brünn/Brno, 1942)’ is one of an ongoing series of silverpoint drawings based on portrait photographs taken mostly in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and which have found their way into my hands via a second-hand shop in my home town, Margate (U.K.). MY drawings are a kind of meditation on these displaced traces of lived moments.
This particular drawing is of a woman who, judging from the hand-writing on the back of the photograph, was a German-speaker living in Brünn in 1942 in what is now the Czech Republic. Brünn is nowadays called Brno. At the end of the war the ethnically German population was expelled.
The medium is silverpoint on gesso on board (21cm x 15cm). The piece has been repeatedly drawn onto with points of silver wire, drawn into with needles, and scratched-away with scalpel blades and sandpaper. The image goes through a process of repeated loss and re-finding. With each re-working, certain details change; but always the repeated point of reference is the original photographic image. I draw in the hope of catching sight of something which I could not have foreseen but which feels somehow true. These drawings are worked on over the course of months and years. They often never reach an end-point.
My drawing pays attention to a displaced souvenir from the past. Each re-working points to the same thing but each re-working is also a different drawing. Whatever it is that I’m trying to see seems always to be elusive.
Hand-made drawings remind us that there is always another way of seeing and that there is always another way to mark those moments of recognition. I wonder who I have drawn here.
The selectors for this year’s Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize are the artist Sheela Gowda, Simon Groom (Director of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Galleries of Scotland) and Zoé Whitley (Director of Chisenhale Gallery).
You can find more about this body of work on my other Drawing, ‘Roy Eastland: Drawing’ and on my youtube channel.
Fingers crossed!
