Drawn 2013 Call for Entries

Drawn 2013 - Open Submission

Exhibition Dates 23rd March to 2nd June 2013.

(above image On Paper, Sarah J Trigg)

The boundaries between drawing and other art forms has always been blurred; when does the outline become the painting, the graph become the blueprint, the line become the work?

As a means of communication and navigation, drawing has taken on a universality and accessibility unlike any other medium. It is a building block of creativity, key to the visualisation and translation of ideas and practices, fundamental in making, doing, testing, failing, designing, thinking, playing and living.

Drawing has taken on different definitions across the centuries, crossing spatial and theoretical boundaries, creating signposts that act as intersections between disciplines as diverse as typography and photography. Drawing allows us to analyse, record, map, mark and form, making the abstract legible, and the legible oblique. Its history is inscribed with legibility as it skirts around the boundaries of text and image. It can be either a representation, or an expression, creating shadows and memories, marks and imprints, traces in space.

Drawn 2013 aims to raise the profile of drawing, exploring it as both an autonomous discipline and an interdisciplinary tool. The exhibition pushes the parameters of drawing by exploring the parallel language of multiple disciplines.

Submissions are invited from artists who either draw, or explore the concept of drawing in their work, including: illustrators, videographers, sculptors, printers, embroiderers, typographers, animators and architects etc.

Artists are encouraged to use both wall and floor space utilising both traditional and experimental techniques and technologies, exploring the boundaries of drawing.

Submission is now open and will close at 5pm on 14th March 2013.

How much does it cost to submit work?

Submission fees are charged per item:

How do I submit work?

To read the exhibition Terms and Conditions please download a copy here - Please note you do not have to upload an image for this exhibition.

To read the Transport Regulations please download a copy here Please note that the deadline for booking transport has now been extended until 5pm on the 13th March. Please remember to check the last collection date before booking.

To find out how to use our Online Submission System (OSS) please download the OSS User Guide and FAQs here

Invited Artists

We are delighted to announce that the invited artists for Drawn 2013 will be Simon Read and Reece Jones. Each artist will be exhibiting two works, exemplifying the diversity of contemporary drawing.

Simon Read is an artist who has a great deal of experience across several media. For a great many years he enjoyed considerable success working through a museum and gallery context, developing an expanded interpretation of photography, but has increasingly found that this does not allow the scope to interact with other disciplines and in other areas. This has led him to foster projects on a collaborative basis where the outcome might range from a public commission for an architectural site to consultancy, the medium might vary from a very complex drawing or sculptural work through to something more discursive lending itself to publication.

Reece Jones makes large scale drawings using charcoal. Essentially process based, they are developed using a system of application and erasure. Building up complex invented landscapes and locations only to systematically erode them using glass papers. Responding to the new-found nuances of surface, tonality and description created by this aggressive intervention, Jones re-builds the images only to repeat the process time and time again. The results are shimmering, atmospheric, sub-narrative works, which appearing almost filmic - belie their rudimentary material composition.

Exhibition Prizes

The Theresa Knowles Travel Bursary Prize (£1500)

The Theresa Knowles Travel Bursary offers a bursary to an artist to enable them to spend time in Italy making work. The main emphasis for this award is that the applicants should demonstrate a high standard in draughtsmanship. The selected artist will be invited to exhibit work from/inspired by the trip, in a solo drawing exhibition at the RWA. If you do not wish to be considered for this prize please inform the RWA. Please note that only UK passport holders are eligible.

RWA Innovation in Drawing Award (£1000)

£1000 cash prize awarded to selected work that pushes the parameters of drawing, exploring the boundaries between drawing and other art forms.

Artist Residency Prize

One artist will be awarded an artist residency at the RWA including studio space for 1 week and £200 materials bursary. The artist will be asked to engage in our Learning Programme as part of the residency.

Bristol Drawing School Scholarship for Students

1 student artist will be awarded a one year scholarship enabling them to attend our weekly Life Drawing Drop-in classes for one year. Artist must be enrolled in full time or part time education.

All artists selected for exhibition will be invited to the Private View and Prize Giving on 22nd March 2013.

Selection Panel

Dr Janette Kerr PRWA is President of RWA, Visiting Research Fellow in Fine Art, UWE; member of Land2D and PLaCE; makes paintings and drawings on canvas and paper, occasionally integrated with photographic images; current work concerns the interface between art and science - images of extreme sea and meteorological data.

Dr Iain Biggs RWA works as an artist/teacher/researcher. He is currently Associate Professor in Visual Arts Practice, Director of the PLaCE Research Centre, and a member of the Advanced Centre for Drawing at UWE, Bristol. He edits for and owns Wild Conversations Press, which produces collaborative artists’ bookworks; and is a founder and co-convenor both of LAND2 (a national network of landscape artists working in Higher Education); and the international Mapping Spectral Traces Network.

Carol Peace co-founded The Bristol Drawing School, as a not for profit partnership in November 2007 with the aim of celebrating the importance and diversity of drawing. She is a practicing artist who has obtained numerous public commissions and solo shows in London, Athens, Zurich, France, Spain and Holland. She is a sculptor who could not work without drawing. The process of drawing, that intuitive response, is in part what she aims for in her work. She sculpts in clay, which like charcoal is quick to make marks with, once finished it is cast into bronze when those fluid marks of the making are then fixed.

Desmond Shawe-Taylor is the Surveyor of The Queen's Pictures. He was previously Director of Dulwich Picture Gallery since 1996. He has overseen the major refurbishment of the Gallery, which was inaugurated by The Queen in 2000. He is a graduate of University College, Oxford, where he was awarded a First in English. He obtained a further degree in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute and from 1979 to 1996 taught in the History of Art Department at the University of Nottingham. Mr Shawe-Taylor has written on a wide range of subjects, including Georgian portraiture, the paintings collection at Dulwich and numerous exhibition catalogues.

Yvonne Crossley studied Painting at Goldsmiths College School of Art in the 60’s and completed a PhD in Fine Art in 2001. Solo exhibitions include Ikon, Laing and Battersea Arts Centre among others. Her awards include an Italian Government Bursary, a Brazilian Government Scholarship and a DAAD Post-Graduate Research Grant. She worked in art education from the 1970’s until in 2004 she left her post as Vice-Principal at Wimbledon School of Art to set up The Drawing Gallery in Duke Street St James, in 2007 she relocated the gallery to Walford in Herefordshire eight miles west of Ludlow. She has been a member of a number of selection panels related to national competitions including The Jerwood Drawing Prize and The Hugh Casson Drawing Prize (Royal Academy Summer Exhibition).

Jessica Cooper RWA has lived and worked in Cornwall in the isolation of West Penwith’s spare and weather worn landscape for most of her life. She studied at Falmouth College and Goldsmith’s, London and is a member of the NSA and an RWA. She exhibits regularly on a national basis, and has exhibited at The Exchange and Newlyn Art Gallery, the RWA and Tate St. Ives . She has previously been awarded for drawing by the University of the West of England and short listed for the finalists exhibitions of the National Open Art Competition and Bite Artists Making Prints.