Watercolour on archival print on canvas

52 x 42cm

2019

I have been teaching in prisons for a few years now, and one of its becoming aspects is developing where possible, a respectful companionability with the learners. Drawing is one of the subject areas I teach, and to demonstrate a sustained drawing process, I ask one of the class to sit for a portrait, and I take a likeness, which thrills the sitter and develops confidence in the activity. It is as much simply being present with someone, (in a Marina Abramović way), but the drawn likeness is still an artefact to share. I had never considered exhibiting these images, as much in respect of the privacy of the subjects, but also as they were made as teaching examples, not as studio work. On occasion I will flick back through the sketchbook and be reminded of the personalities of the individuals. There is a different potency in a likeness as a drawing than in a photographic “mug-shot”. The inmates understand very clearly that they a part of an indifferent system- their photographic face becomes part of their culpability. A system of records, a networked archive of power over the individual- one identity of many; convicts past, now and still to come.

After a conversation with Andrew Dewdney, London South Bank University, and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, about the pervasive, but largely hidden volume of photographic material in the “cloud”, I was drawn back to this modest volume of portrait drawings.

The portraits had become a private archive, a memory stream, a curiosity if anything, if ever seen, to anyone else. Following the conversation with Andrew, and some others subsequent to that, I became intrigued by the idea of making visible reference to an archive that was manifestly immaterial and largely invisible. I took my modest, unseen archive produce some composite works that appear as distinct personalities/individuals, but are completely unlike any of the individual sitters.

The resulting portraits are a convincing contrivance based on a composite of specific moments, personalities given up as a sketched likenesses. And these proportional interventions become representative of the whole. They could be any man. But are not ‘just’ any man. Each of the three resulting works are as unique as the original drawn likenesses.

The Centre for the Study of the Networked Image http://www.centreforthestudyof.net/

See also from the Australian National Portrait Gallery, Conflicting images

by Michael Desmond, 1 June 2008 https://www.portrait.gov.au/magazines/28/conflicting-images

Dugald Saunders MP New South Wales State Parliament December 19 2019- Jack Randell wins inaugural Custodial Artist of the Year.

https://www.facebook.com/DugaldSaundersMP/videos/502649710353089/