Jerwood Drawing Prize 2005
Until February 18; Glasgow School of Art

It’s two years since the annual Jerwood Drawing Prize has toured to Scotland, but this year it’s back at Glasgow School of Art, bringing us 78 of the judges’ favourites from 2005. The pictures spill out of the art school’s Mackintosh Gallery, into the West Ground Floor Corridor, where like sirens they lure you through a set of swing-doors marked NO PUBLIC ACCESS.

Queen of the sirens is the stunning, larger-than-life wedding dress, knitted by Irene Lees not with wool, but with white ink. The sensuous, rippling garment is constructed on black paper in a continuous white line, each and every loop describing an individual knitted stitch. There are no outlines, no shading. The entire shape and form of the suave gown is described by these inky loops alone.

The magisterial drawing presides, unframed, over the corridor, black paper pinned against the black wood of the walls. There is no better place, visually, for the drawing to be, but whether it will survive the corridor’s busy comings and goings is another nail-biting matter entirely.

Sitting opposite Lees’s masterpiece, quietly waiting its turn, is Sam Messenger’s Long Before. Like Lees’s work, it’s drawn with pen on paper, and like Lees’s, it was done with prodigious patience. But while the former is a picture of breathtaking charisma, Messenger’s drawing inspires a quieter kind of contemplation.

Long Before is a neatly organised representation of 50 different rulers, all hand-drawn. Every mark is tirelessly recorded, from logos and names to each millimetre marking. But the beautiful thing is that despite the presence of all these rulers, there are no straight edges. The lines are all a little bit shoogly, and the measurements, though meticulously drawn, don’t always match up.

Messenger’s drawing bears two clear messages, both common concerns among artists. The first warns that measurement, always subject to human frailty, can never be an act of pure precision. But the over-riding lesson to take from Long Before is the cheerful acknowledgement that human imperfection has, after all, got much more going for it than steely, straight-edged perfection.

In the catalogue to the show, Messenger’s statement is shorter than any other artist’s: “Fifty rules drawn freehand.” Good on him. Many of the others are painfully superfluous, detracting from the power of the drawings to speak for themselves. Fortunately in the exhibition itself there is not a single interpretative panel in sight, leaving you to enjoy the wonderful range of works without the textual equivalent of an over-zealous sales assistant hovering at your shoulder.

It doesn’t take explanatory labels to tell you that there is a strong conceptual basis to almost every work in the show. The selected work displays not just technical proficiency and artistic instinct, but also an intelligent approach to drawing which adds up to countless hours of deep thinking about the nature of drawing itself.

There are works which explore the passing of time inherent in the making and viewing of drawings, and the movement of the body during that time. Some artists play with the relationship between the real and the represented, and several choose to distort maps, reconceptualising the places in which we live.

One of my favourite pieces is Douglas White’s Mop Drawing. Placing a dirty mop head on a large piece of blotting paper, White effectively left the drawing to make itself, out of all the dirt and residue of the central London building which the mop had been used to clean.

In the centre of the sheet is the dark imprint of the mop head’s stringy strands. Towards the central blotch runs a trail of dirty water, and away runs the splatter of impact. On the fringe sits a dirty yellow halo the size of a hula-hoop, which slowly seeped its way from the mop head. The paper has recorded all of these actions taking place at different speeds, and as drawing should, it finally presents them as a single image frozen in time.

The unconstrained freedom of White’s experiment is the exception rather than the rule in this year’s award. There is an unusually large proportion of technical drawings in the show, involving maps, graphs, and architectural draughtsmanship. This may well be due to the inclusion of Professor Stephen Farthing on the judging panel; in his catalogue essay he expresses a strong interest in such disciplines.

Among these technical drawings is the endearing 2nd prize winner, Mantelpiece Maps by Katie Cuddon. In strictly objective fashion, the artist has mapped out the contents of mantelpieces in various family homes. We can see that the owners of 126 Salcott Road are scarily minimalist, while others are crammed full of ornaments and discarded toys. It’s the dry, archaeological delivery of this nosey-parker information which makes the project irresistible.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 05.02.06