Eye Line drawing competition's third place, Student, goes to Max Cooper-Clark who draws a worrying picture of over-intensified land and human exploitation with skillful use of charcoal
Max Cooper-Clark
Royal College of Art, London
Using the agricultural history of his site in the rural Alentejo region in southern Portugal, Cooper-Clark draws attention to a forgotten historic symbiosis of this land’s soil with its former tillers with modern ‘colonial extractivism… desertification, soil erosion and a continuum of racial capitalism in the exploitation of migrant workers from Portugal’s historic colonies.’ He draws a worrying picture of over-intensified land and human exploitation based on subsidies that have helped mar the contemporary landscape.
Even bagasse, a by-product of olive oil extraction, is no longer used as a natural fertiliser but ‘burned as a monetizable fuel,’ making the land ashen. So this story evoked in charcoal, to ‘reflect the overlaying and accumulation of systems in its technique – evocative of the particulate pollution – figures layered and rubbed away to reveal the histories and cartographies that pervade contemporary land uses.’
Judges were struck by the politics of the drawings and how their materiality resonated with the issues, Begum calling the interplay ‘striking and intriguing.’ Power was impressed by how the images ‘convey the unexpected, apocalyptic nature of modern-day farming and the individual at the centre of it.’ Fernie added: ‘The storytelling is fantastic – counterpointing [simple charcoal-based techniques ] with big themes of global, industrial-scale farming.’
Eye Line award winning drawings from this and previous years