Shaun Young uses fabrics and pattern to collapse the space between representation and reality in plays on Croome Court near Worcester
Practioner: Commended
Shaun Young
Senior lecturer, Northumbria University
Young’s long drawing uses a plan of Robert Adam’s Croome Court near Worcester to frame the perspectival interventions of a wholly reversible installation of the estate’s artefacts, set up in a contiguous suite of rooms in the stately home. The installation itself works with Adam’s motifs, using fabrics and pattern to play increasingly ‘attenuated’ spatial games as one moves through the spaces. Young describes it as the ‘developed surface’ drawings characteristic of Adam’s practice, collapsing the space between representation and reality.
The judges appreciated the fact that these spatial ideas manifested in a play on the drawing itself, with Kester Rattenbury, professor of architecture and cities at the
University of Westminster, enjoying ‘the fact that it’s a project in itself - using the framing and composition of drawings to make a drawing.’ Andy Turk, CEO of sponsor Siderise, was ‘won around’ by the argument to make it commended, as were Rory Chisholm, 2021 Eye Line winner (practitioner), and Niall Hobhouse, trustee, Drawing Matter, who both remarked on the framing device albeit with a lesser degree of enthusiasm. In all, the drawing worked in communicating what Young called ‘the illusive, painterly quality of “movement” in architecture that Adam so coveted’.