Week Ten | Erasure and the Turner Prize
I didn’t make it to the Turner Prize this year, it just wasn’t viable. But at a time when I am just beginning my first large scale drawing the exhibition might have been particularly useful. Barbara Walker’s Drawing Installations are created in situ, which interests me with quite a specific context and time experience around how the drawings are created. She also says she knows that the drawings are temporary: “I am already saying goodbye when I begin the first mark”.
Walker describes her installation work as being about visibility and interacting with an audience in a space on this scale. She describes a '“quiet erasure” where the victims of the Windrush Generation were quietly erased… Walker found documents and a paper trail to prove legitimacy of these individuals. The drawings of the people themselves over the top is provocative and creates a distortion of importance: these documents have become more important than the people for her participants.
Walker talks about erasure as being key to her practice where consciously or not she has always been removing, erasing experiences as a subverted commentary on power distribution and injustice.
Questions for me in response to these observations:
Drawing in situ? I am not sure this interests me in the same way as it feels so relevant to Barbara Walker’s work
Large scale drawing is intensely interesting to me - most of my drawing in the past has felt more intimate and handheld (sketchbooks etc) and I enjoy the disruption of beautiful, skilled drawing but on a massive scale
Materials - I love the idea of using just pencil or simple drawing materials but my drawing practice leans more towards experimental work with a range of materials. This demands the question of where the line might be between drawing and painting. Definition not required but I feel it’s important that I explore what I am doing here for myself
Substrate worries me - I have 10x1.5m of fabriano paper at 200gsm, which won’t be robust enough to withstand too much rough handling
I still have no idea how to present the piece but I can consider this as the making develops.
Addendum: Listening to The Gallery Companion Podcast with Dr Victoria Powell about Barbara Walker and also Claudette Johnson’s show on at the Courtauld is also a reference to large scale drawings around the Windrush Generation and black identity. I am wondering how and why large scale drawings are supporting other themes such as climate - maybe go small instead… ??
Monoprinting
I have been revisiting mark making through monoprinting in the studio this week and I have tried hard to have an honest conversation with myself about which marks feel like mine and which are appropriated and I posted on instagram here. The intention here was to simply print anything that came out with whatever was within reach and make binary decisions about whether the mark or expression felt like something authentic to me or acquired and derived.
