T H E P R I S O N P R O J E C T

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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 prisondrawingproject@gmail.com

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 (mikeambler@yahoo.co.uk)

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 (mikeambler@yahoo.co.uk)

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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

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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

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Email kate@kateblackillustration.co.uk

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

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Email greigburgoyne@btinternet.com

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Email tracylynnhimsworth@yahoo.co.uk

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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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Email russell.smith2@stu.mmu.ac.uk

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

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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

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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

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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

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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