Graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
Selected by Simon Lewandowski
Kingdom: Animalia, 2008
Artist statement
I have set out to observe live and dead exhibits. The theme of drawing animal specimens took me to the Booth museum in Brighton and to London Zoo. At London Zoo I sat down to draw a gorilla, she came right up to me and seemed to pose which was very unexpected and was documented by film. The glass barrier between the gorilla and myself and the glass of the camera lense seemed the most controlling aspects to this creative experience. I felt a barrier not just of glass but also of my own distance from my instincts, something we humans often strive against. The instinctive aspect of the animal to human relationship is the focus of my drawings. Engaging in this instinctive activity I felt a respect for and connection to the animals.
Each time I went back to draw the gorilla she would come and sit with me, but I encountered unexpected problems, limiting my access and filming at the zoo. Initially I had permission to draw at the zoo but was later told that I could not sit down and draw the gorilla even though other visitors sit there. My continuing presence instigated many a debate with the zookeepers before they threw me out. This experience provoked new questions; what is the zoo's role, if not encouraging education and better relations between humans and animals? From my experience it seemed as though the animals are there to be looked at but not learnt from.
Whilst drawing animals in museums and zoos the glass boundaries were ever present, even in contemporary zoos' (Victorian ideals persist.) There seems to be an illusion created by these institutions. It is dictated as to how to think about the animals on show or how to experience them. To some degree our interaction is controlled and packaged.
This in mind, I placed my drawings in Victorian display cabinets' still containing residue and evidence of the once housed dead exhibit. The exhibit drawings seem neither dead nor live. Boxing up the drawings as if intuition and instinct (our animal side) are controlled and sheathed, mimics taxonomy. Freud promoted the reigning in of our irrational, primal desires and I think this resulted in a contemporary day dislocation that I have experienced in trying to learn from nature, therefore I wanted to represent this experience in my work.
Selector text
As a rule I prefer teaching undergraduates - in a BA cohort the freaks and oddballs are yet to be weeded out by the system and the rest haven't started thinking they're Real Artists. (Which is not to say MA courses don't have their share of eccentrics.)
Selecting, for whatever reason, an artist as distinct from a work presented some problems: I loved Charlotte Andrews' Drawing Cart, Sabine Tholen's crystalline wall drawings, Caterina Lewis' scrappy little perspex paintings, Heena Kim's weird melty figures: look at them all, they're on the website. But imagine a hypothetical individual who might have made any and all of those things - that would be someone to look out for.
In the end I chose Rachel Overfield.
- Because I think she's not real, she's an alias, the name is too appropriate, too right - I'm suspicious.
- Because I imagine her as a mousy, white-coated technician skiving in the basement store of a provincial museum, making endless drawings of animals and bones and bits of animals over and over on discarded pieces of packaging paper. I imagine her meeting Charlotte Andrews out with her Drawing Cart and joining in.
- Because its just little pictures of things, incomplete but unmediated, no machines, no processes, just someone making marks on bits of paper with ink or pencil or marker pens that anyone can buy anywhere and do anytime even (and especially) when all the oil and gas runs out and there's no electricity anymore.
- Because of the way she hung them all which was just a little bit contrived but complaining at artists being contrived is like complaining about soldiers shooting people - its what we pay them for, dammit!
- Because I love her drawings so much I thought if I chose her maybe she'd let me have one (is that allowed?)
(Simon Lewandowski, 2008)
Qualifications and training
- 2008 MA Fine Art, Central Saint Martins School of Art
- 1999 BA Honours Degree, University of Brighton
