Ambush: 11

This drawing was nominated for the 2009 Jerwood Drawing Prize Exhibition In the ‘Ambush’ series of pencil drawings I concentrate on front line victims co-opted into the service of war by structures of power. Through media coverage, current battlefields become one with false notions and legends of former times displayed in early American films. Drawing the comic turmoil of cowboy games of war, the fixed, funny and formal postures of the perpetrators revolve slowly in the mythical morass to reveal more realistic, believable figures of contemporary soldiers and civilians in attack or surrender stance. An endless repetition of stationary forms emerges, moving off the ragged edges in robotic confusion, an intimation of the same regurgitated grievances and accounting, which pattern the centuries. These pencil images on transparent papers joined together with seams and creases are infinitely vulnerable, disposable and fragile as life.