Dryden Goodwin

Dryden Goodwin (born 1971, Bournemouth) is a British artist,^[1] known for his intricate drawings, often in combination with photography, film, large-scale, screen-based installations and soundtracks.

Selected works

Central to Dryden Goodwin's practice is a fascination with drawing.^[2] However, the ways in which he explores this age-old practice are anything but traditional. He is engaged with time as well as line, and with the sculptural potential of two-dimensional images. Other concerns in his art are also strongly contemporary: the city, ideas of public and private, voyeurism, desire and emotional distance.

Recent projects include Linear for Art on the Underground, London, 2010 and a commission for the Who am I?^[3] gallery at the Science Museum, London, 2010. Recent solo exhibitions include Cast, Hasselblad Foundation,^[4] Gothenburg, Sweden 2009 and Photographer's Gallery, London, 2008; Flight, at the Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2006 and Sustained Endeavour: Portrait of Sir Steve Redgrave, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2006.^[5]

Single screen

Hold (1996)

Hold exploits the fact that film is made up of separate frames; the majority of the film features a new person on every frame, or every eighteenth of a second. The video Hold considers the nature of memory, exploring the tension between our desire to hold onto experiences against the inevitability of the passing of time.^[6]

Ospedale (1997)

Ospedale is an experimental documentary film, made in a provincial general hospital in Italy. The film moves through different areas and departments of the hospital. The complexities of relationships between the range of people in the hospital is explored, also the nature of their physical and mental contact.^[7]

Closer (2001)

Goodwin's short film Closer^[8] investigates the encounters we have with strangers in public places. Using a zoom lens and a long distance laser pen Goodwin collapses the spatial distance between the camera's eye and its subject, filming individuals as he simultaneously touched them with a beam of light.^[9]

The critical response included:

"Goodwin is stimulated by an unholy appetite for unforeseen, risky encounters on his sleepless wanderings through the city. He aims at catching us off-balance, ambushing our eyes and ears - an important young talent" ^[10]

Installation

Wait (2000)

The multi-screen video installation Wait takes as its starting point the dramatic tension that surrounds the build up towards the moments when the last millennium changed into the present one. The work explores the continual universal desire to find significance and look constantly for the moment of change. The tripartite emotional structure of each of these events—anticipation, realisation and aftermath—is used by Goodwin as the blueprint to set up a matrix of emotional states.^[11]

The critical response included:

"Wait examines the act of looking and being looked at in public spaces, the ennui, the excitement and just the everydayness of spectatorship. The work succeeds because Goodwin is able to exploit the potential for theatre contained in the act of looking, because the viewer begins to devise narratives, seeking to enter the lives of the artist's subjects." ^[12]

Above/Below (2003)

Above/Below evokes the relationship between public space and private visual encounter. The two screens, positioned horizontally at the top and bottom of the raised platform, project images filmed in Durham Cathedral, one of the largest religious buildings in Europe. The screen below centres on Goodwin's secret observations from the pinnacle of the Cathedral's tower filming through an invisible opening down onto the people and activities moving through the floor area known as "the Crossing". The screen above captures the intensely contrasting light that strikes the Cathedral visitors who glance upwards at the awe-inspiring structure.^[13]

The critical response included:

"’Above/Below’ by the British artist Dryden Goodwin, displayed in the Clandestine section of the Arsenale, has a haunting philosophical clarity."^[14]

Two Thousand and Three (2003)

Two Thousand and Three is a filmstrip consisting of that many frames. On each of the individual film frames a different person appears, photographed during the massive protest marches against the war in Iraq, in London, in 2003. The installation presents two copies of the same film, the first copy is seen on the projection screen and the second copy is presented in a light box table; studying the separate frames with a small magnifying loupe.^[15]

Flight (2006)

Flight is an installation of inter-related elements including a film combining live action, animated intervention and a multi-layered soundtrack, presented alongside hundreds of small-scale pen and ink drawings, which construct and constitute the animation. The film element of Flight expands on a short film commissioned by the animate! project, funded by Arts Council England and Channel 4 Television in the UK.^[16]

The critical response included:

"It is this combination of peeping-Tom-style surveillance with a frank intimacy that makes his films so engaging. Flight, Goodwin's new film installation, follows the journey of an unseen protagonist escaping the urban jungle."^[17]

"Goodwin fuses the handmade and the digital in a way that feels inherently personal - and more engrossing with each successive view."^[18]

"Aided by an eerily layered ambient soundtrack Dryden Goodwin's installation ‘Flight’ has a dream like quality…the drawings used in the animation reinforce the idea that something strange or other worldly has taken place."^[19]

Photography, drawing and printmaking

Suspended Animation – 29 Drawings of the Same Photograph (2000)

Second in a series of works the first being Suspended Animation - 26 Drawings of the Same Photograph 1998. The work consists of 29 drawings of the same photograph. The drawings are:

1. The framed drawings in a long continuous horizontal line around the gallery space.
2. As a video animation where the 29 drawings are transferred to video, one drawing appearing for one frame and then looped in a continuous animation.^[20]

Sustained Endeavour (2006)

This newly commissioned portrait of Sir Steve Redgrave consists of 25 meticulous pencil drawings, based on the same photograph, displayed alongside an animated, high-definition video of the drawings played in rapid succession. The video animation accumulates the artist's draughtsmanship into a single, intense moving image, creating a kinetic portrait of Britain's greatest ever Olympic athlete.^[5]

Cast (2008)

In this exhibition, Cast,^[21] Dryden Goodwin presents five new series of works – Cradle, Shapeshifter, Casting, Caul and Rock. Each series features portraits of strangers captured by the artist as he has travelled through London. All the works in this exhibition combine drawing with photography in a range of ways.^[22]

The critical response included:

"He draws strange patterns and structures onto the peoples' faces: webs of white are scratched into the surfaces of the black and white pictures (photographs) to invent inner forms within heads, so it is as if you can see a diagram of the skull and the brain within the portrait, although it is a spiritual rather than a scientific discovery he's nudging towards. In his colour pictures, rivers of red heighten the sense that we're looking into the organic inner space of the person - he is imagining an encounter with the warm red stuff of another person's life...Goodwin achieves something both sweetly simple and massively original. It is an explosion of the heart in the cold medium of the camera...If you think there's no imagination, soul or talent in contemporary British art, this journey through the streets of London will make you change your mind."^[23]

Public art

Linear (2010)

Linear^[24] is a series of portraits of individuals with different working roles on the Jubilee line. Goodwin drew 60 pencil portraits^[25] of staff at work, or at moments of pause in their day, and has created 60 films recording the drawings being made. Together they form an intimate and diverse social portrait^[26] of this community of workers. The drawings are displayed on poster sites across the London Underground network. The films can be viewed online,^[27] offering the opportunity to unlock the creation of each portrait.^[24]

The critical response included:

"Ordinary faces look back at you from posters at London Underground stations, drawn in intense black lines, almost like forests of wiring. There is a hum of represssed energy, as if you were approaching power lines on a wasteland. There is also a solitude, a silence in the portraits that reach out, with their eyes, to you the stranger ... and then you've moved on, carried by the crowd, the connection is lost...........They're engaged, emotional, hardworking sketches."^[28]

References

External links

• Dryden Goodwin Website
• Art on the Underground: Linear website
• Art on the Underground
• Slade School of Fine Art: Lecturer Profile
• Cast at the Photographer's Gallery
• Cast at the Hasselblad Foundation
• Art Now: Dryden Goodwin at the Tate Britain
• Linear Documentation
• Film Documentation of Linear

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Persondata
Name	Goodwin, Dryden
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1971
Place of birth	Bournemouth, UK.
Date of death
Place of death