Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize winners announced
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Caroline Burraway wins Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2018
Thursday, 27 September, 2018Caroline Burraway’s stunning Eden, The Jungle Calais 2016 (2017) has won the £8000 First Prize in this year’s prestigious Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize.
The charcoal drawing is a powerful depiction of Eden – a young refugee living in the migrant camp in Calais commonly known as The Jungle.
Burraway recalls the poor living conditions in The Jungle where “there were no facilities at all, not even toilets or running water”. She added “Eden was sharing a small tent with lots of other girls – she was incredibly enigmatic.” For Burraway, drawing felt like the appropriate medium to convey the ‘humaness’ of refugees like Eden, “unlike film which is very immediate and has a quick uptake, a drawing offers the viewer time and space – I hope they begin to see their own humanity and history in the face of the subject”.
Gary Lawrence is the recipient of the £5000 Second Prize for his drawing Moonlit Delphi c/o Samuel Palmer, a spectacular, large-scale depiction of the ancient amphitheatre at Delphi in Greece, executed with great technical precision in Biro, felt pen and poster paint on paper.
Lawrence’s drawing is developed from a smaller drawing of the same subject, set at night and influenced by Palmer’s small engravings of moonlit landscapes. The illuminated topogrophy of the drawing and the place evokes the ancient idea of Delphi as the ‘navel’ or the centre of the world. Lawrence has won the Drawing Prize twice before, in 2017 for Yellow Kalymnos and Fridge Magnets and in 2011 for Homage to Anonymous.
The Student Award of £2000 is awarded to Laura Hudson for Nail House Drawings, a series of nine charcoal drawings on wash on paper, fixed to the walls with nails, and which refer to ‘architectural holdouts’, where people refuse to make way for the demolition of their homes.
Hudson – an MA Fine Art student at City & Guilds of London School of Art - said: ‘The drawings have to be barely there; I have tried to create a form so paired down that it lies on the cusp of being one thing and then another - a universal something that stands in for something else and lingers in the mind metaphorically - a conjuring line - a character with an absence of fixed boundaries.’
Andy Bannister has been awarded the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize for a Working Drawing worth £1000. ROC Post '64 is developed from a diagram of a Royal Observer Corp (ROC) underground monitoring post from the early 1960s.
Reflecting the artist’s interest in the relationship between urban space, architecture and lived experience, the drawing enables us to consider the purpose of drawing in conveying the function of these, now decommissioned, spaces. Throughout his work, Bannister focuses on elements of the built environment that have either been forgotten, overlooked or destroyed by the passage of time, neglect or conflict; in doing so, he considers their place within individual and collective memory.
The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, formerly known as Jerwood Drawing Prize, continues to champion and celebrate the excellence of contemporary drawing practice within the UK. The award winning drawings were chosen by Nigel Hall RA, artist; Megan Piper, contemporary art dealer; and Dr Chris Stephens, Director of the Holburne Museum in Bath, from the 69 works by 67 artists they selected for the 2018 exhibition.
Professor Anita Taylor, Executive Dean of Bath Spa University's Bath School of Art and Design, and founding Director of the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, said: “The 69 drawings selected for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2018 exhibition represent a broad and diverse interpretation of current drawing practice, in their subject, content and form. Caroline Burraway’s large-scale charcoal drawing presents a compelling portrait of a young migrant, Eden, in a refugee camp in Calais; here, the unique capacity of the act of drawing to provide a record through close observation brings Eden’s presence (and experience) to the forefront of our consciousness.”
The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize exhibition will be on display at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London from 29 September – 17 October 2018 (closed 6 and 12 October). This will be followed by a national tour to The Gallery at Arts University Bournemouth (22 November 2018-10 January 2019); the Royal Drawing School in Shoreditch (2-22 February 2019); Drawing Projects UK, Wiltshire (2 March–26 April 2019); and Chapel Gallery in Lancashire (4 May–6 July 2019).
Supported by Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust, the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize is selected from original drawings submitted via Collection Centres across the UK. The annual exhibition has established a reputation for its commitment to championing the role and value of drawing in contemporary practice. It offers emerging, mid-career and established artists and makers a national platform to exhibit their drawings, and celebrates talent and excellence in current drawing practice.