Seeing Hand (2017) (Installation)

Seeing Hand (2017) (Installation)
Film and related drawings, commissioned through Launch Pad, Private Collection, Shanghai, China
(Including a 95 minute film, 454 drawings (various sizes), overall dimensions of 3 frames 5280 mm X 1260mms)

'Seeing Hand' explores the sensual and psychological state of drawing, to make a heightened connection with a person or place. Considering how drawing can become a means to elicit knowledge and insight, chronicling the personal and public realms, acting as a catalyst for the imagination. Goodwin's drawings range from the sustained and closely rendered, to the sparse and diagrammatic.

For 'Seeing Hand', Goodwin made a series of trips to Shanghai for a combined period of 6 weeks. During this time, he lived with the collector, familiarising himself with the immediate neighbourhood, the collector's family, friends and associates, and further afield, with the public spaces and environs of the city. He made hundreds of drawings that chronicle the people, places, and situations he encountered. Goodwin also recorded the process of image-gathering on film and sound recording, creating a 95-minute documentation film which accompanies the work. The result is a multi-dimensional piece that captures in micro and macro the combinations of old and new, traditional and contemporary, familiarly Western and distinctly Chinese, which distinguish Shanghai and the hosts themselves.

Commenting on the heightened sense of connection to subject that drawing elicits, Goodwin describes, "Any individual person, much like a city as vast as Shanghai, resembles a drawing, built up in layers and marked over time, mapping a development towards an unknown state, incomplete and speculative, holding history, personal narratives and imagined futures."

"Dryden Goodwin's work revolves around carefully observed social and environmental situations that he records in drawings and often combines with photography and live action video. His practice reflects a fascination with the distinctions between public and private, an inquiry that he develops most clearly in the context of the city where the two are often indistinguishable. Voyeurism and forensic observation are at play in equal measure in his intricate drawings of strangers, of bus passengers, for example, of restaurant diners, of people waiting in airports or hospital wards for loved ones"

Text by Sarah Elson, founder of Launch Pad

'Seeing Hand' was commissioned through Launch Pad and launched on November the 10th 2017, during Shanghai Arts week

Launch Pad's website