selected :: The Derwent

Drawing Prize  

OXO Tower, Southbank London

:: 04 > 14 April 2024

ongoing :: Untitled (Paper Sizes and Film Formats), 2024

+ Input: My project objectifies something of our industrial and empirical past; suggesting the notion of a deep history and a realignment of our understanding of that history.

+ Paper Sizes: The work points to an underlying regard to the name and origin of the ‘Imperial’ paper sizes which are inseparably linked with the history of the British Empire; mere mention of one can only remind us of the other. When  learning to be a mechanical draughtsman we solved mechanical drawing problems on ‘Half Imperial’ or ‘Quarter Imperial’ paper, it was the industry standard.

 + Photographic Plate Sizes: Before, there were a number of different sized plate cameras, and consequently as many photographic film or plate formats; in memorialising these historic examples of film formats we romanticise on artisan skills and self-fulfilling labour; strangely these systems coexisted during the same time period and applied to the provenance of both the established ruling class and the working class alike.

 + Philosopher: Vilém Flusser tells us that ‘the cultural condition is captured in the act of photography rather than in the object being photographed’, also that ‘images are significant surfaces, signifying mainly something out there in space and time that they have to make comprehensible to us as abstractions’.

 + Output: Applying cross hatched areas of film format sizes to imperial paper sizes reminds us of the two realities; as reinvention the drawn film format sizes translate to both memorialise and deny the photographic process ; by applying these drawings to ‘Imperial’ paper sizes reflects empirical nostalgia whilst attempting to signify surface and make comprehensible to us the cultural condition.