Drawn to Dundee | Panel Discussion

Speakers' Biographies

Lucy Byatt is Director of Hospitalfield, Arbroath. Since 2021 she has devised a public programme based on supporting artists through residency opportunities and the development of new commissions made for the programme at Hospitalfield and for public platforms elsewhere across the world. This emphasis is placed at a time when institutions tend to forget that artists, at whatever stage they are in their careers, need time and space to make new work and the opportunity to fail in order to succeed.

Byatt directs a public programme that reflects a strong commitment to working with contemporary artists as well as the care of, and engagement with Hospitalfield’s fascinating heritage and collections. Her priority is to establish an effective interdisciplinary programme, rooted in the visual arts, that is continuously broadening its engagement with people living and working in the region of Angus whilst continuing to sustain an international focus.





Simon Groom is the Director, Modern and Contemporary Art, National Galleries of Scotland.

Groom graduated with a degree in English Literature from Edinburgh University, before spending time living and working in Japan and Italy, and then completed an MA and PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, in modern and postwar international art. Simon worked as the curator at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, and Head of Exhibitions at Tate Liverpool, with a special interest in art from the Asia Pacific region, before joining the National Galleries of Scotland.



He was one of the selectors of the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2021.





Tania Kovats’ practice and research as an artist is an exploration of our experience of landscape, increasingly with an environmental focus. Her work includes temporary and permanent sculptural works often in the public realm, drawing, and writing, that currently consider her preoccupation with water, rivers, seas and oceans. She works at the confluence of environmental, psychological, political, and the personal. Kovats is an advocate for drawing in its expanded field, as a highly significant tool of thinking and expression, that provides an infinite and varied means of communication that continues to be expanded and enriched by practitioners. She regularly seeks out engagement and impact with audiences beyond the gallery. Her works are in both public and private collections in the UK and abroad, including Arts Council, Jupiter Artland, The British Council, Government Art Collection, the National Maritime Museum Greenwich, and the V&A.





Jade Montserrat was the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship supporting her PhD (via MPhil) at IBAR, UCLan, (Race and Representation in Northern Britain in the context of the Black Atlantic: A Creative Practice Project) and the development of her work from her Black diasporic perspective in the North of England. She was also awarded one of two Jerwood Student Drawing Prizes in 2017 for No Need for Clothing, a documentary photograph of a drawing installation at Cooper Gallery DJCAD by Jacquetta Clark. Jade’s Rainbow Tribe project – a combination of historical and contemporary manifestations of Black Culture from the perspective of the Black Diaspora is central to the ways she is producing a body of work, including No Need For Clothing and its iterations, as well as her performance work Revue. Jade was commissioned to present Revue as a 24 hour live performance at SPILL Festival of Performance, October 2018, a solo exhibition at The Bluecoat, Liverpool, (Nov – 10 Mar 2019) which toured to Humber Street Gallery ( July-sept 2019) and was commissioned by Art on the Underground to create the 2018 Winter Night Tube cover. Iniva and Manchester Art Gallery have commissioned Jade as the first artist for the Future Collect project (2020). As of 2021, Jade participated in a group exhibition titled An Infinity of Traces at Lisson Gallery, and opened a solo exhibition titled In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens at Bosse & Baum Gallery, both in London.





Olivia Plender (born 1977) is an artist based in London and Stockholm. Plender's work often starts with research into social movements and their histories, because what we think we know about the past inevitably shapes what we believe is possible in the future. She is interested in the relationships between gender, power and authority – who claims the right to speak in public and how the ‘rational’ is defined. Through collaborations with both adults and children – in workshops, performances, installations, and videos – Plender attempts to listen to those voices that usually go unheard and reflect on some of the problems with how history has been written. She also make drawings and comics, including an ongoing series titled The History of Animal Kingdom. Recent exhibitions include The School of Creators: The Art of Learning from the 1960s to the present, Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2022; 34th Bienal de São Paulo, 2021; Life Support, Glasgow Women’s Library, 2021; Not Without My Ghosts, Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition, 2021-2022.





Natsumi Sakamoto (born in Tokyo, Japan) is an artist based in Glasgow who creates multi-media installations that include film, drawing and animation. Her practice employs oral tradition to examine memories of hidden history through a feminist lens. She explores the politics of women's work and gender roles embedded in the intangible heritage of superstitions, songs and everyday ritual passed down through intergenerational memory. 

Her work aims to make visible the multiplicity of storytelling by voicing individual experiences through cross-cultural dialogue. Her recent solo and group exhibitions include: Knitting the Intangible Voices, 16Nicholson Street, Glasgow (2021); Memories in Movement, Place MAK, Seoul (2019); Quiet Dialogue: Invisible Existences and Us, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo (2019). She works internationally and with one of her most recent works she collaborated on a transnational filmmaking project between Scotland and Japan, "Speculative Fiction: Practicing Collectively" which was screened at e-flux Artist Cinemas. She often works collaboratively with artists from different disciplines and she is also a member of the feminism-focused artist collective called Back and Forth Collective.

 

Anita Taylor is Dean of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design at the University of Dundee. She is the founding Director of the foremost annual drawing exhibition in the UK, the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize [since 1994], and Drawing Projects UK, a public-facing initiative dedicated to drawing [since 2009]. After graduating from MA Painting at the Royal College of Art [1987], she became Artist-in-Residence at Durham Cathedral [1987-88], then Cheltenham Fellow in Painting [1988-89].

She has extensive teaching, research, peer and expert review, and her academic leadership experience includes: Executive Dean of Bath School of Art and Design at Bath Spa University; Director & Chief Executive Officer, National Art School in Sydney, Australia; Dean of Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts London [UAL]; Director, The Research Centre for Drawing at UAL; and Vice Principal of Wimbledon School of Art.





Calum Wallis (born 1993) grew up in Ross Shire, UK, moving in 2013 to study Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone in Dundee, where he now lives. His practice asks questions of how humans relate to the natural world, posing them in the form of drawings made in, of and with the landscape. Borrowing, isolating, rescaling and repurposing natural formations, his drawings ponder the roles of memory and expectation in our experience of nature, and the deeper memory held within the earth. His drawing practice increasingly seeks to grow fresh arms, now encompassing kinetic sculpture, performance, printmaking and walking, with a sleep-based drawing practice being his final frontier.

Image credits

Bet Low, Stormy Passage, 1983. Courtesy Simon Groom. 



Undated drawing of peonies by Francis Place (1647-1728). Courtesy Lucy Byatt and the collection of Hospitalfield. 

Calum Wallis, 86 Bricks, 2021. Graphite on paper and canvas. 20m x 4m. Photo by Ben Douglas.



Olivia Plender, The History of Animal Kingdom – Prologue, 2016. Ink on paper (detail), 21 x 29.7cm



Jade Montserrat, No Need for Clothing, 2017. Drawing installation at Cooper Gallery. Photo by Jacquetta Clark.



Natusmi Sakamoto, Knitting the Intangible Voices, 2020. Exhibition view at 16 Nicholson Street. Photo by Bart Urbanski.

Funders and partners

The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize project is led by its founding Director, Professor Anita Taylor, Dean of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design at the University of Dundee, and is supported by the Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust.