Animation Graduate's Jerwood Prize Win Underlines RCA Emphasis On Drawing
20 September 2012 – Animation graduate Karolina Glusiec has scooped the top honour at this year’s prestigious Jerwood Drawing Prize, underlining the emphasis and value the RCA places on drawing.
Awarded at a ceremony in London on Tuesday 11 September, Karolina took first prize of £8,000 for her hand-drawn animation, ‘Velocity’.
Bada Song took a second prize of £5,000, with Katie Aggett and Min Kim each receiving student prizes of £2,000.
Karolina credits the RCA’s emphasis on finding ‘truth’ in drawing with guiding her development: ‘The style of teaching at the RCA is not just about technique, it’s about finding truth. The more you imitate, the less valuable your drawing is. What I learned is to be credible and that mistakes tell you what you can, rather than can’t, do.’
She created ‘_Velocity’ _after a period of illness, which resulted in problems with her eyes and having to avoid artificial light. The circumstances prompted a shift in her work, away from lightboxes towards traditional animation and drawing from memory.
‘When you have limitations, or few resources and strength, you can still come up with something that is true to you,' she says.
Curator and co-founder of non-profit organisation Drawing Room, Kate Mcfarlane, who worked on the selection process said that the quality and range of work coming from students and recent graduates ‘says a lot about the value placed on drawing within art schools and how it is taught’.
She added: ‘Judging by the innovative applications of the medium, I would suggest that it is valued and challenged at the same time.’
One the most prominent themes to come out of the 3,000 entries to this year’s programme was hair, with ‘dozens’ of drawings of facial, body and artificial hair submitted.
Lisa Milroy, also a selector, and artist and head of Graduate Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL said: ‘By the end of the judging process, we had looked at dozens of drawings of heads of hair, chest hair, tufts of hair, beards, single strands of hair, wigs, and real hair sandwiched between glass or glued to paper in suggestive swirls or spelling out words.’
Entries such as ‘Notes from the Toyko Underground’ by Carl Randall, was selected for a ‘clever’ method of presentation to share observation drawings made on sketchbook pages. And both Ruth Simon’s ‘_Phenotype’ _and Kasper Pincis’ '_As If You Could Kill Time Without Injuring Eternity’ _were held up as exemplifying how drawing is vital to discovery and critical thought.
The selected works are exhibited at JVA at Jerwood Space, London from 12 September - 28 October 2012, and will then tour to venues across the UK including the new Jerwood Gallery, Hastings and mac, Birmingham.
The Jerwood Drawing Prize 2012 runs from 12 September – 28 October 2012 at the Jerwood Space, 171 Union St, London SE1 0LN.