A clean slate for the artists of the future

Associated media

Darrelyn Gunzburg investigates how art has given new opportunities to 45 young people aged 13–19 from across Avon and Somerset, England

What might Andy Warhol have created when he was 11 years old? A pencil drawing on paper purchased for $5 (£3) by Andy Fields at a Las Vegas yard sale in 2010 may offer an answer. It was part of the estate of Edith Smith, a woman who cared for Andy in the 1930s, and some Warhol experts strongly suspect that it may be a portrait of the American singer and entertainer, Rudy Valleé drawn when Andy was ill in bed with chorea and listening to the Rudy Valleé show on radio. The portrait features Warhol’s typical bright red lips and sits on the coloured block background used in Pop Art. Whether or not it is authentic is the current debate in Warholian circles.

The ‘Clean Slate’ exhibition at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol was conceived by the Avon and Somerset Police as part of their youth outreach work to forge strong links with young communities before the alleged Warhol drawing came to their attention. Nevertheless, as a central focus of the exhibition, the drawing serves its purpose of examining the early expressions of creativity in young people who may then take this further into a career in art. The brief to young people across the Avon and Somerset area was to create works of art within three categories: 2D, 3D and digitally generated. The competition was divided into two age groups: 12–15 and 16–19.  Entries were exhibited in five district exhibitions and the finalists brought together for the RWA exhibition.

Curated by Miriam Brown, ‘Clean Slate’ was displayed in a light-filled room. The shifting light coming through the glass roof reflected the enormous variety and imaginative energy of these young people. Works included a bedroom decoration with a butterfly theme, chalk carvings, painted and photographed landscapes, portraits, dresses, wallpaper designs, pottery, an arrangement using animal bones, and small and large iron sculptures. It is a disservice to the exhibition to be unable here to discuss them all here but there were a handful that particularly captured my attention.

An Eye For Detail, 17-year-oldCelie Nigoumi’s digital photograph of her friend Tom’s right eye overlaid with an ordinance survey map on an acrylic surface, is a visual pun. Standing in front of the image the viewer is reflected in the acrylic, thus gaze and glaze join the observer and the subject in a physical way within the picture surface, turning this enjoyable wordplay into a dynamically engaging piece.

In Another Era, 15-year-old Dan Bolter’s evocative night scene of Victorian buildings on a cobbled street, photographed in black and white, is bookended with a 1930s typewriter and a vintage car. A simple black frame with a white and black insert enhances the evocation of a bygone era.

The same framing is used in 17-year-old Jenny Yeo’s lyrical continuous narrative photograph Dancer, overlaying images to give the impression of the dance itself.

Using a strident palette in oil on canvas, 17-year-old Emily McIndoe’s portraitWaiting reveals a concerned woman looking anxiously to the viewer’s right, apprehensive eyes and furrowed brow suggesting worried anticipation. Keeping this unframed against the white wall added to the immediacy of the piece. Using 10 different-sized spoons attached directly to the white wall, the concave surfaces of 13-year-old Tamara Barbeary’s Spoon Flower reflects and distorts the activities in the room, as sun might play on petals outdoors.

Nicola Rodriguez, aged 17, in her Mexican Day of the Dead Head shapes a striking portrait bust, made from green clay, of a Mexican woman in a flowered hat, red lips, red eyebrows, red fingernails, and shoulder and chest overlaid with rose and skull tattoos.  Placed at waist height on an open plinth, the ‘dead’ woman appears to emerge from it, affording the viewer the opportunity to consider the bust from multiple perspectives.

In Miniature Chalk Carvings, I was reminded of the drama school exercise of using an object not as an object in order to bring fresh insights into how one viewed the world. Millie Uhlein, aged 18, has taken 10 sticks of white chalk and, with a hand-held Dremel, carved faces resembling those on Easter Island. Mounted on a black background in a floating frame, the effect is astonishingly beautiful. 

All the unique worlds created by these young people in this exhibition articulate the difference between looking and seeing. They represent invested time and harnessed skill. And they represent the future. Not all these young people will continue the journey of the artist but all have displayed a perspective that imbues the mundane world with something more, something that touches and nourishes us because it allows us to see the world differently. It is to the credit of the Avon and Somerset Police that they have opened this doorway and a joy to the viewing public that these young people have stepped through it with verve and daring.