Told through the prism of the artist’s drawing activity, the work captures an incomplete global ’portrait’ at a period in time. Drawn from projections of streamed internet clips from news outlets and social media, Goodwin traces heads and faces in ink, featuring world leaders to people unknown, he explores the empathetic impetus to connect with others from the limitations of one’s own perspective, questioning how it is possible to relate to the complexity of the world and to understand what’s going on. Grappling with the ever-changing zeitgeist, through this highly personal mapping, it’s what the drawings imply which is ultimately more important than what they capture. A 3 part installation: 100 pen and ink drawings on paper Video documentation (Duration: 9 hours 30 mins) Video animation (Duration: 3 minutes) Year: 2017

For 'Seeing Hand', Goodwin made several trips to Shanghai for a combined period of 6 weeks. During this time, he lived with the collectors, familiarising himself with the immediate neighbourhood, the Lees’ friends and associates, and further afield, with the public spaces and environs of the city. He made hundreds of drawings that chronicle the people, places, and situations he encountered. Goodwin also recorded the process of image-gathering on film that will be screened as part of the exhibition. The result is a piece that captures in micro and macro the combinations of old and new, traditional and contemporary, familiarly Western and distinctly Chinese, which distinguish Shanghai and the hosts themselves. 3 large composite frames of drawings, containing over 300 drawings, and 1 and 45 minute documentary film

Goodwin has made a series of drawn head studies produced on traditional 3 1/4 inch Magic Lantern slides. Projected individually through an original 19th century Magic Lantern, the slides are also embedded amongst a display of historic slides in the Beaney’s collection. The images are of Goodwin’s mother, a sequence of separate portrait studies that depict single moments from a movement panning around her head. Each week a different slide from the set is taken from a glass vitrine and switched with the one in the lantern, creating a slow-motion animation over the course of the exhibition. At any one time, when exhibited, 12 of the slides will be displayed in a Glass vitrine By dissecting and slowing down this fluid movement into single drawn frame stills ’13 X Christine’ suggests the latent cinematic potential of this early pre-cinema technology. Goodwin’s drawings themselves act as another metaphor for the nurturing of an image into being, with the thrill of revelation as the subjects head turns to meet the gaze of the viewer. Embracing the seductive qualities of the Magic Lantern, the soft lighting, and quality of intimacy evoked when revealing an image to a small audience, Goodwin’s delicate images of his mother, small in scale, projected to near life-size, draw the viewer in, expressing an innate desire to hold on to an image against the inevitability of the passing of time. ’’Assembling the small Magic Lantern slides using the original 19th century glass and sealant tape was a tactile and delicate process and a way to connect with this earlier art form. For me, the powerful transformative quality of the lantern’s projection comes from the change in scale. Firstly directly viewing the collection of tiny fragile glass slides in the vitrine, then each one illuminated, enlarged and focused upon through the ’magic’ of the lens.’’ Dryden Goodwin

Unseen: The Lives of Looking - Keynote Lecture, for 2015 Queen’s House Conference - 'Ways of Seeing', National Maritime Museum, London

First shown alongside the feature-length film, 'Unseen: The Lives of Looking' at the Queen's House, Royal Museum's Greenwich, for 5 month show, this multifaceted work consisting of 4 large frames, displaying the over 100 drawings created during the making of the film asnd 4 vitrines containing artefacts used by the individuals featured in the film - the eye surgeon, the planetary explorer, the human rights lawyer and the artist/film maker.

Unseen: The Lives of Looking (2015) 90' Dryden Goodwin’s first feature-length essay film, focuses on four individuals, each with extraordinary relationships to looking: an international eye surgeon, a NASA planetary explorer, a leading human rights lawyer and the artist/filmmaker himself. Mixing Goodwin’s closely observed drawings, live action and intricately woven soundtrack, the film explores different scales, forms and reasons for looking, in a poetic and metaphysically charged journey. Revealed through intimate access is the empathy and dexterity of the surgeon working with the fragility of the human eye; the quest of the planetary explorer to decipher the cosmos and find evidence of life on Mars; and the scrutiny of the British government, by the lawyer, in extraordinary rendition, drone attack and mass surveillance cases. Goodwin’s looking and implicit presence links the lives of these probing observers, exposing a kinship between those who live by the sensory rules of observation, a desire to decode in pursuit of knowledge and insight. The film’s perspectives range from the minute details of surgery to panoramic expanses of space. Vignettes of strangers and a brief focus on Goodwin’s father and son, invite us to contemplate the known and the unknown, the personal and the remote. Exposing the imaginative leaps we take to reveal what might be concealed or out of sight, the film considers both the physical act of looking as well as the tools we use to perceive the world around us and how these form our own identities. WRITTEN & DIRECTED: Dryden Goodwin CAMERA, DRAWING & SOUNDTRACK: Dryden Goodwin FEATURING: Professor Sir Peng Tee Khaw, Professor Sanjeev Gupta, Rosa Curling, Jeffery Goodwin & Fynn Cole-Goodwin EDITORS: Dryden Goodwin & Jo Cole RESEARCHERS: Jo Cole & Imran Perretta PRODUCERS: Jo Cole & Sarah Caddy EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Gareth Evans PRODUCTION MANAGERS: Harriet Masterson & Sukey Richardson PRODUCTION & SOUND ASSISTANTS: Brada Barassi & Imran Perretta SOUND MASTERING: Tony Perretta

Cambridge bus interchange – part of major new development of Cambridge, 100 etched stainless steel metal plates, with portraits drawn by Goodwin as he roamed Cambridge, inset into the paving stones of the main bus interchange.The public will glimpse these portraits in a number of ways; as they pass through the interchange, as they wait for buses at the shelters and also as they return to the interchange, alighting from the buses. Wander considers how this collection of 100 hand drawn portraits of unknown people from Cambridge, will cause the variety of communities that use the bus shelters to respond. From a day-tripping tourist, who may only see some of the plates, to a local resident having the possibility to discover previously unnoticed etchings along their daily route through the site over many years.

'Artist in Conversation,' Conversation with Jack Southern part of 'Drawing Making Making Drawing', Drawing Room, London

The 72 minute film in 12 parts, focuses on artist Dryden Goodwin's encounters's with 12 people from the East Durham area. Each person has a hands-on specialist skill, ranging from tattooing, to woodturning to horse training. 'Skill' encapsulates the drawings Goodwin made observing each person at their work and the conversations that took place. A celebration of dexterity, passion and commitment, capturing a shared deftness of hand and mind, as each person transforms the materials they work with.

Talk as part UCL’s, University College London’s, Lunch Time Lecture Series

Breathe is a drawn animation made up of over 1,300 small intense drawings, featuring the artist's 5 year old son breathing. The emphasis of the work is that air can both sustain us but also corrupt and damage us. Breathe has developed from 1 of 3 projects curated by Alice Sharpe part of the project Invisible Dust. The mission of Invisible Dust is to encourage awareness of, and meaningful responses to, climate change, air pollution and related health and environmental issues. It achieves this by facilitating a dialogue between visual artists and leading world scientists. Invisible Dust strives, through its creation of high impact and unique arts programmes, alongside new scientific theories, to create an accessible, imaginative and approachable forum and stimulus. Goodwin has worked with Scientist Professor Frank Kelly of of Kings College and St. Thomas’ Hospital. Invisible Dust was Awarded 1 of only 2 Wellcome Trust’s ‘Large Arts awards’ given in July 2010.

Talk to the Environmental Selected Committee, ’Turner Updated’, discussing ’Breathe’ installation showing on St Thomas’s Hospital, opposite the Houses of Parliament.

In a series of interlocking episodes, Dryden Goodwin’s 28-minute film explores the physical and emotional dynamics of a group of young female divers. Portraying the girls on their own, interacting with each other, and under the rapt, imploring gaze of their coaches, Goodwin’s camera combines extreme close-up with oblique detail to illuminate their intensity of focus and their idealisation of grace and ‘flow’. Looking beyond the arc of the dive itself to consider its metaphorical, even metaphysical resonance as a rite of passage between different states, Written, Directed, Camera, Edited and Soundtrack by Dryden Goodwin 1 of 4 artists working with ‘Film and Video Umbrella’ (including Cornford & Cross, Susan Pui San Lok and Roderick Buchanan) awarded development funding from the Welcome Trust. The projects explores the state of heightened performance and super-charged awareness that characterises an athlete being ‘in the zone’ and supplies a specific frame of reference for this series of artist-scientist research collaborations that will stimulate dialogue on the subject to help outline and develop a number of moving-image art works commissioned and first exhibited in the major group exhibition in July-September 2012 at the De La Warr Pavilion. Poised is a collaboration with Dance Scientist Elsa Bradley, focusing on Olympic divers at Crystal Palace National Diving Centre. Project managed by to Film and Video Umbrella, London, for the past 20 years the UK’s foremost commissioner of moving image work by leading contemporary artists. Poised is 1 of 4 commissions, part of the In the Zone project awarded a ‘Large Arts Awards’ by the Welcome Trust 2011. Only 2 ‘Large Arts awards’ were given from a total of 65 applications in July 2011. http://www.nowness.com/day/2012/7/2/2256/dryden-goodwin-poised http://www.dlwp.com/event/artist-talk-dryden-goodwin http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKT9mJxKlzc http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/2012/News/WTVM055797.htm http://www.artreview.com/profiles/blogs/everything-flows-opens-at-de-la-warr-pavilion-bexhill-on-sea-30 http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/photography %26 film/film art/art391048 http://membership.contemporaryartsociety.org/news/cas-recommends-august-2012/

Drawing Projects: Dryden Goodwin interview Cornelia Parker, Jeff Koons and William Kentridge are among the artists who have contributed to a new book which explores why draughtsmanship is still fundamental to contemporary practice. In this edited extract from 'Drawing Projects' by Jack Southern and Mick Maslen, British artist Dryden Goodwin gives a highly personal account of why he thinks drawing is the most emotive and revealing medium available to an artist.

Drawing Projects: Dryden Goodwin interview Cornelia Parker, Jeff Koons and William Kentridge are among the artists who have contributed to a new book which explores why draughtsmanship is still fundamental to contemporary practice. In this edited extract from 'Drawing Projects' by Jack Southern and Mick Maslen, British artist Dryden Goodwin gives a highly personal account of why he thinks drawing is the most emotive and revealing medium available to an artist.

presentation followed by an in-conversation with writer Geoff Dyer chaired by curator Camilla Brown, Part of the Images of the self series n the 1920s and 30s, the photographer E.O. Hoppé took his camera out onto the streets of London, Berlin and New York and photographed ordinary life. Smiling street urchins, bathing orphans and exhausted immigrants gaze at the supposedly neutral camera. This discussion, timed to coincide with the National Portrait Gallery’s major retrospective of Hoppé’s work, explores early twentieth-century photography’s search for ordinary, representative subjects, placing Hoppé alongside contemporaries such as Bill Brandt, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. Together Geoff Dyer, author of The Ongoing Moment, a writer’s meditation on the nature and history of photography, and the artist Dryden Goodwin will ask what was at stake when photography switched its focus from the drawing-room to the street. The discussion will also explore the legacy of this kind of portraiture. Recently, Dryden Goodwin has made a series of portraits of 60 London underground staff going about their work, and filmed himself working with his subjects. How does this process differ from photography? And how has public art developed, over the course of the last century? The discussion will be chaired by Camilla Brown, a curator and writer on contemporary art.

For the making of this project Goodwin accompanied Louis in different situations over an 18 month period, closely observing his activities and daily routines, for example when at home, at work, in meetings, during meals, in the gym, watching a film or driving his car. Although occasionally alone, he was mostly drawn in the company of others, either one person or a combination of people, all with different relationships with him, for example work colleagues, his trainer, members of his family, his wife, his son, his daughters, his father, his mother or his friends. Through this activity Goodwin made 440 small pencil drawings, for the majority of the time drawing back and forth between the subject and the individuals he came into contact with, some of the drawings are only a few lines, others are more worked up. Goodwin presents the drawings in two ways: inanimate, in a frame, mounted in the order that they were made and secondly as an animation, in which the drawings are sequenced in multiple combinations to further explore, reflect on and draw out the suggestions and nuances contained within the individual drawings and relationships between them. Louis considers the idea that a portrait is never adequate to the task of portraying an individual. It still remains that many aspects and subtleties of each interaction are concealed or distorted, however, it seems possible that these absences are active spaces for the imagination. The 'portrait' considers how individuality is expressed and defined by one's relationships with others.

In the on going series Mould the surface of photographs are given further dimensions. Using folding, scoring and puncturing, intense studies of heads are coaxed onto the cusp of three dimensions. In all senses of the word, Goodwin tries to discover a form for his speculations about these people, through his touch he attempts to reanimate both the surface and the underside of the photographs. Presented separately and in clusters Mould suggests a proliferation of associations, a breeding ground of imaginative connections. Goodwin, interested in the re-introduction of the hand and mind into the infinitively reproducible photographic image, shapes and constructs these photographic surfaces into unique low reliefs.

Portrait of the Warden - Steve Nickell, Commissioned by Nuffield College, Oxford - 3 drawings and 3 short films

Linear, by artist Dryden Goodwin, is a series of portraits of individuals with different working roles on the Jubilee line. Goodwin has drawn 60 pencil portraits of staff at work, or at moments of pause in their day, and has created 60 films recording the drawings being made. Each drawing concentrates on a person’s face and head. The films show the accelerated progression of these drawings, accompanied by fragments of the conversation between the artist and ‘sitter’, revealing a multitude of personal exchanges and stories. Together they form an intimate and diverse social portrait of this community of workers. The drawings are displayed on poster sites across the London Underground network. The films can be viewed online, offering the opportunity to unlock the creation of each portrait.

One Thing Leads to Another, Everything is Connected Lily Hall traveled the Jubilee tube line to explore the recent Art on the Underground project, finding artworks from Stanmore to Stratford.

Review - Linear - Dryden Goodwin's art stands out from the crowd Goodwin's quietly powerful portraits of London Underground staff capture the mystery and melancholy of life in the capital

"...On the cusp between a preserved world of tradition and ceremony and a contemporary one of media scrutiny and celebrity culture, Prince William encapsulates the myriad of dilemmas that confront the Royal Family as it evolves. He is seemingly available to all in pictures and interviews, whilst a real sense of this heir to the throne is inevitably ungraspable and out of reach. Working from video stills selected from YouTube produced a balance for me between intimacy and remoteness. I've created decontextualised moments; the portrait is composed of different expressions with his eyes shut, possibly of contemplation or of fleeting ecstasy or sorrow. When making the work my imagination was filled with a kind of accentuated sense of Prince William. I like this idea of developing my own imagined knowledge of him through the act of painting with watercolour; speculating, interested in what might be revealed. I'm interested in the relationship between my experience of making the work and how this translates to its viewing. With his eyes shut there seems to be a greater sense of his inner thoughts, even though you are inevitably excluded, I'm interested in how this spurs the imagination. The closed lids are a barrier that made me want to approach and go beyond. There's also something challenging about painting from a very low-resolution image. You have to interpret more, invent and embellish; meaning, to a certain extent, that the contours of his face were constructed in the mind's eye, like a strange vivid dream of being with someone famous where you start to have a sense that you are close to them. When you paint someone using red watercolour it seems simultaneously fragile but visceral. There is this received notion of blue blood to differentiate royalty, but I like the association with actual blood, emphasising this more fundamental truth and connection with Prince William as just another person..."

For the 2010 update of the Who am I? gallery Dryden Goodwin created three new works, Caul 8, Cradle Head 4 and Synapse, installed in a case including brain scanning technology. Goodwin makes portraits of strangers he sees in passing on the street and public transport, and uses drawing, photography and film to attempt to discover insights into these strangers. He sees relationships between the way he uses drawing as an act of speculation and exploration and scientists' uses of instruments to try and understand the human brain. As well as responding to physical appearance, Goodwin's drawn marks seem to make visible the unseen aspects of the individuals he draws, suggesting a sense of mystery and the unknowable. In turn, through these richly detailed portraits, as viewers we arrive at our own conclusions about his subjects, their thoughts and feelings. Seeing them reminds us of the mysteries inherent in being human, which we may never completely unravel. We find ourselves asking questions about whether science or art gives us a truer picture, or whether they just reveal different things.

For the 2010 update of the Who am I? gallery Dryden Goodwin created three new works, Caul 8, Cradle Head 4 and Synapse, installed in a case including brain scanning technology. Goodwin makes portraits of strangers he sees in passing on the street and public transport, and uses drawing, photography and film to attempt to discover insights into these strangers. He sees relationships between the way he uses drawing as an act of speculation and exploration and scientists' uses of instruments to try and understand the human brain. As well as responding to physical appearance, Goodwin's drawn marks seem to make visible the unseen aspects of the individuals he draws, suggesting a sense of mystery and the unknowable. In turn, through these richly detailed portraits, as viewers we arrive at our own conclusions about his subjects, their thoughts and feelings. Seeing them reminds us of the mysteries inherent in being human, which we may never completely unravel. We find ourselves asking questions about whether science or art gives us a truer picture, or whether they just reveal different things.

Annual Seminar Understanding British Portraits is an active network with free membership for professionals working with British portraits including curators, museum learning professionals, researchers, academics and conservators. We aim to enhance the knowledge and understanding of portratis in all media in British collections, for the benefit of future research, exhibitions, interpretation, display and learning programmes.

A major monograph exploring the rich dialogue between drawing, photography and video that defines London-based Dryden Goodwin's hybrid practice. This volume includes several new works as well as Cradle, a continuing series of strangers photographed on the street at night. Published to coincide with a major exhibition of Goodwin’s work at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, this book brings together new work featured in this exhibition with earlier works to explore the rich dialogues between drawing, photography and video that define Goodwin’s hybrid practice. Cast extends these enquiries and their various collisions between drawing and photography and takes further Goodwin’s practice of drawing and scratching onto the surface of the image, something at once intimate and invasive, a physical intervention that the artist also characterizes as a way of ‘thinking into the photograph’ and into the stalled nature of photographic time.

1000 words magazine - Portrait Issue Special Book Review of Cast

Addressing the wide range of animation techniques used by artists, the Animation Breakdown weekend presents two screenings and a study day that provide an opportunity for broader discussions about the relationship between the moving image, drawing, and the digital. Speaker on Artists' Panel: Stills Moving: Interrupting the Real World "We don't really experience photographs as static. Still images..represent accumulations of time - which we as viewer reactivate..perhaps." Angela Kingston in The Animators

A Round up of the given week's essential art shows. A review of Pattern Recognition at City Gallery in Leicester.

A Review of 'Pattern Recognition' Group Show at City Gallery Leicester

A Book Review of Cast

Bs1 was a two year programme of creative interventions in response to the evolution of Cabot Circus, in Bristol from building site to retail centre. Six artists, were invited to participate in the BS1 programme. The Bs1 project was conceived and organized by Neville Gabie who was the artist in residence during the build from 2006 to 2008, working closely with Sam Wilkinson of InSite Arts, the arts consultants for the whole development. Dryden Goodwin made a series of 12 etchings of heads responding to the different histories and cultures of the incredibly large number of people who worked on the development, local people as well as people originating from all around the world. An edition of prints were made from the plates, before the plates were permanently installed into a curved polished slate wall, part of the central stairwell to Cabot Circus. As part of a blog that was written during the process of the work Goodwin described...... ...The buildings themselves are, in a way, monuments to the work force, by creating a small, permanent and detailed record of just twelve of the different individuals, I hope to evoke and suggest a sense of the personal contribution of thousands. From featuring the individuals who are leading the whole development, across the spectrum to the bricklayers and canteen staff, in a single horizontal line, in no particular order, I want to emphasize a kind of democracy of shared endeavour. Placing this small scale series of portraits in the heart of the development next to the central stairwell and underneath the epic roof seemed to counterbalance the eventual inevitable invisibility of these people, this area being a place where visitors to Cabot Circus are encouraged to sit, rest, eat and talk.

A review of 'Cast' at the Photographer's Gallery London

22-23 November 2008 When feeling sad at home, I have often boarded a train or airport bus and gone to Heathrow where, from an observation gallery in Terminal 2 or from the top floor of the Renaissance Hotel along the north runway, I have drawn comfort from the sight of the ceaseless landing and take-off of aircraft. - Alain de Botton Forget rushing through airport terminals being scanned, x-rayed and cross examined. Heathrow is the ultimate destination to sit back, relax and just watch the world come and go. In the company of philosopher Alain de Botton you’ll be transported from Tokyo to Amsterdam, Istanbul to Warsaw, Seattle to Rio without leaving the comfort of the airport’s numerous lounges and waiting areas. Alain will introduce you to people whose lives are intimately linked to the airport, take you behind the scenes of the baggage handling minefield, explore the iconography of airports for artists and writers, and help you think more deeply about how we might all improve ourselves in the art of travelling.

Panel Discussion With the Hand in Mind: A Conversation with Video Artists Dryden Goodwin and Jacco Olivier Moderated by Sarah Elson, member of Princeton University Art Museum's Advisory Council and contemporary art adviser and educator, the panel discussion will focus on the work of contemporary artists Dryden Goodwin and Jacco Olivier, who combine two-dimensional media with the time-based medium of video. Location: James Stewart Theater

Artist's presentation

Rock is the final work presented in this exhibition. In this small scale monitor piece he plays and replays short sequences of tracings made from multiple photographs taken looking up at passengers as they approach and move past on the top deck of night buses. Plotting the arc of movement the animation plays these swooping motions back and forth and at different speeds. The fine red lines of the drawings create molten, fluid movement taking on an almost sculptural dimension.

The first works presented here are from the series Cradle. In these new works, extended from a previous series, Goodwin etches into the print surface of black and white portraits he has made of passers by on the streets. As Goodwin inscribes into the print, as if to reach back to the moment of the photograph's original exposure and to his subjects' pensive moments of reflection, the title Cradle takes on a literal tone. The work becoming a site of nurturing in which he wonders about these strangers, imagining an affinity and even an intimacy with them. Nevertheless, within the scratching of the print's surface, a sense of violation also lingers, as does the subjects' vulnerability to a less than benign form of voyeurism.

Shapeshifter includes a display of nearly seven hundred small, rapidly made sketches drawn from direct observation of fellow passengers on trains. Goodwin presents these drawings both separately and amalgamated into one moving image work. The title Shapeshifter also refers to the work as something that could have almost supernatural overtones, comprised from a vast array of different individuals brought together to create a shimmering chimera.

In Casting Goodwin juxtaposes photographs of street scenes with drawings he has made from them, picking out individuals and then revealing, through repeated drawing and re-drawing, his extended process of looking and imagining. Again in this series there is ambiguity, the artist's repeatedly drawn heads suggesting a growing intimacy with his subject but also a developing forensic scrutiny, as if evidence is being compiled.

For Caul, Goodwin draws into the photograph using a digital drawing tablet, the artist presses onto its membrane-like surface with a digital stylus, the more pressure he exerts the deeper and more luminous the line he draws. A Caul is the name given to a portion of the amniotic sac that can be left over a child's face at birth. In some cultures, the caul has demonic associations; more usually it is considered sign that the child is safeguarded, even bestowed with special powers. Goodwin's title resonates with this association, reinforcing the visceral quality of the distinctive red lines that cover the faces of the people in the work, like blood vessels or raw tissue.

The first works presented here are from the series Cradle. In these new works, extended from a previous series, Goodwin etches into the print surface of black and white portraits he has made of passers by on the streets. As Goodwin inscribes into the print, as if to reach back to the moment of the photograph's original exposure and to his subjects' pensive moments of reflection, the title Cradle takes on a literal tone. The work becoming a site of nurturing in which he wonders about these strangers, imagining an affinity and even an intimacy with them. Nevertheless, within the scratching of the print's surface, a sense of violation also lingers, as does the subjects� vulnerability to a less than benign form of voyeurism.

A permanent commission made for a new building that combines health and local authority services in Hull. During September and October 2007 artist Dryden Goodwin, having been commissioned to make an artwork for The Calvert Centre created a series of small pencil portraits of individuals who represent the wide variety of people who will work at or visit the Calvert Centre. The constellation that this circle of portraits creates is an acknowledgement of the multitude of people that come into contact at the centre and also a celebration of their individuality. Importantly these portraits were made by the artist from direct observation whilst in the company of each individual. The conversation between the artist and sitter influenced the development of each drawing. The time it took for each of the portraits to be made was between 20 to 40 minutes. The small drawings have been enlarged as photographic prints to make them viewable from a distance. The location they are shown in is particularly significant. The portraits are suspended above the main intersection where people arrive before dispersing into different areas of the centre to interact in a variety of ways. The portraits depict patients, local residents of different ages, a doctor, a practice nurse, administrative staff, two local ward councillors, receptionists, council advisors and officers. The artist has commented on the project, saying that “Sitting down to make portraits of people moments after meeting them is engaging and intense. With each person we didn’t sit in silence, we talked as I was making the drawings. Each person brought their unique perspective, stories and character. Gaining a sense of someone through talking, looking, listening and drawing is a very vivid experience. My approach to each drawing seemed to change with each person and I hope the portraits in some way bring out distinctive qualities of each individual.

A collaboration with Performance Artist Marcia Farquhar On Reflection is one of a showreel of 13 short films and part of Marcia Farquhar’s 12 Shooters project. Each film is directed by a different artist-filmmaker, and derived from a different work from the past 12 years of Marcia Farquhar’s practice. These works include monologues, visitations, walking tours, upside-down exorcisms, a Humpty Dumpty seance, and her famous life-size Punch & Judy show. The 12 Shooters project also features short film collaborations with Zoë Brown, Bruce+Marshall, Jem Finer, Judith Goddard, Andrew Kötting, Trine Nedreaas, Saskia Olde Wolbers, Uriel Orlow, Tom Paine, Sarah Pucill, Tal Sterngast, Gary Stevens. Written by J. Maizlish Mole about On Reflection “…12 Shooters presented its participants with a sort of puzzle: how was a new and independent work to be produced out of the substance, if not the form, of an old one, and to what extent would it then reflect its original precedent? On Reflection is like the answer about the question. While each of the thirteen collaborations went somewhere absolutely distinct in its response, On Reflection went perhaps the furthest afield. It is an exception among exceptions, in that it does not revisit an old work at all – instead, it is an entirely new work on the subject of revisitation. So in a sense it lies somewhere outside the boundaries of 12 Shooters, and in another sense it is absolutely central – perhaps the most direct answer to the open questions at the core of the project….” “…Simply put, Marcia was to watch old footage of past performances while Dryden took still images of her resulting expressions, whatever they might be. These captured expressions would then be synchronized with the sound of the screened footage which had provoked them, along with whatever noises Marcia made by way of response (and the sound of the shutter made at the time of the corresponding photograph). Dryden didn’t really want to reflect with Marcia, he wanted to see what happened when Marcia reflected by herself. I guess he wanted to reflect on her reflection – it’s like a cubist study drawn out over time, considering the uncomfortable subject in her every state and from every possible angle….”

The first two in a series of works combining multiple drawings with an animation. In both works 338 small dip pen and ink drawings search the expressions of an individual. The marks catch brief contrasting moments of serenity, anxiety, excitement, confusion, introversion, and both released and repressed tension. The accompanying animation loop presented on an iPod sequences the drawings in multiple combinations and in different rhythms attempting to extend a sense of exploration both of the activity of the artist and that of the named individual.

The first two in a series of works combining multiple drawings with an animation. In both works 338 small dip pen and ink drawings search the expressions of an individual. The marks catch brief contrasting moments of serenity, anxiety, excitement, confusion, introversion, and both released and repressed tension. The accompanying animation loop presented on an iPod sequences the drawings in multiple combinations and in different rhythms attempting to extend a sense of exploration both of the activity of the artist and that of the named individual.

Artist's Presentation

A review of Goodwin's solo show at The Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK.

This portrait of Sir Steve Redgrave consists of 25 meticulous pencil drawings, based on the same photograph, displayed alongside an animated, high-definition video of the drawings played in rapid succession. The precision of the drawings parallels the oarsman's focus and training throughout his career, while the video animation accumulates the artist's draughtsmanship into a single, intense moving image, creating a kinetic portrait of Britain's greatest ever Olympic athlete. Goodwin's approach to this commission developed out of his fascination with the mental focus and discipline that lie behind Redgrave's extraordinary achievements. Goodwin has chosen to produce a head, shoulders and torso image that shows Redgrave's unique physicality and concentrates on his intense gaze, to convey the latent energy and focus required to sustain such an epic sporting career. The drawings are displayed in a five by five configuration representing Redgrave's five Olympic wins. In the animation each drawing becomes a frame of video played in quick succession and in multiple combinations, seamlessly repeated on a loop. This creates, in the artist's words, 'a perpetual living drawing', illustrating the moment as it moves with time. Combining still and moving images, the portrait communicates the powerful combination of mental stillness and dynamic movement required to win a race. 'I knew at the outset' says Goodwin 'that the portrait would need to involve a time-based element because Sir Steve Redgrave has such a singular relationship to time. The tremendous repetition of training, pushing against time over so many years to be the fastest has been his extraordinary achievement, and by making twenty-five detailed drawings of the same photograph, I intended to emphasize my own time investment, which becomes the key to the portrait. There is a parallel of my own feat of endurance in attempting to replicate his likeness again and again and Redgrave's sustained endeavour.'

Kettle's Yard: Narrative Symposium A symposium organized in conjunction with an exhibition of photographic and film work by the artist Sarah Dobai at Kettle's Yard it took place at at Lucy Cavendish College, Lady Margaret Road. The day will brought together speakers from a wide field of interests and experience, and opened up debate around the contemporary roles of narrative as both a formal and political device, in shaping knowledge, individual and national identity, as means of communication, and as a cultural artefact.

“Dryden and myself found ourselves in the amateur boxing ring via the hidden world of new immigrants, a bar in Dalston and Visconti's 'Rocco E I Suoi Fratelli’. We were a team. He was pictures. I was words. That was the deal. As in a movie, the two are inseparable, each defined by the other. A dance or sparring session. Dryden scampers round the ring, copper plate and stylus in hand - a primitive image thief. I am determined to write nothing. I scour the peeling walls, the ceiling, the stained canvas. Trawling for words: headlines on yellowed sports pages, lists of past club champions, photocopied pages of dusty wisdom - 'Home of Champions'. Round 3. Don's words underscore, inspire, discipline the action. Jabbed out or sung. Sounds. Caresses. Rhythm is everything. Punches. Stains. Sweat. Timeslip. We emerge reeling. Privileged. Looking to the return match” Tony Grisoni

In the large landscape pencil drawings, Goodwin maps and decodes over 360o of his surroundings, made directly in each location. Attempting to assimilate the whole panorama, the eyes dart around the space, plotting small details. As a counter point, the seven smaller ink self-portrait drawings act as the pivot, mirroring Goodwin's active drawing process. Imbedded in the act of looking and recording is continual movement and animation. The focus cannot settle evoking certain disquiet; this undercurrent of paranoia is developed further in the sparing inclusion of figures in the space, suggesting potential dramas.

Artist’s Presentation

Dryden Goodwin Minigraph & DVD. Minigraphs is a series of publications developed by Film and Video Umbrella devoted to contemporary artists working with film and video. Fully illustrated, and with specially commissioned essays and an extensive lists of works, this series provides an attractive and indispensable introduction to some of Britain’s most exciting contemporary artists. Dryden Goodwin’s film and video pieces are poetic celebrations of individuality and humanity, highlighting intimate moments and gestures against the backdrop of a shifting and evocative urban landscape. From photography and drawing to single-channel videos and multi-screen installations, this book explores a broad range of Goodwin’s work, while the accompanying DVD features 26 pieces, including ‘Heathrow’ (1994), and ‘Closer’ (2001), as well as a version of his multi-screen work ‘Dilate’ (2003) that allows the viewer to navigate through 64 possible permutations.

Stay takes three distinct landscapes and presents the viewer with an experience of moving through space while engaging them in the contemplation of still moments. By presenting the individual photographs that make up the animated sequence with the projected image and soundtrack, Stay explores the interplay between momentum and inertia, the imperative for motion and the desire to be still and survey. The shifting soundscape fuses audio captured on location with additional orchestration by the artist. This emotionally ambiguous journey, through man-made and natural surroundings, is both an invitation to linger in these environments, as well as a driving force to leave, as the viewer rushes through the fleeting landscapes. At what point in the journey have we come in? Is it impending danger, yearning or exaltation that creates the tension to move through or remain?

Featuring people known to Goodwin, Red Studies are an on going series of watercolours begun in 2004. In each of these paintings, two images of an individual have been superimposed over eachother. Sometimes the difference between the expression and body attitude from one image to the next is slight, other times more extreme. Goodwin explores what is caught between these two moments, what is revealed and implied.

Four sequences of drypoint etchings from the on-going evolving series State. For each sequence Goodwin uses a single copper plate as a metallic palimpsest, repeatedly rubbed down for reuse, which holds traces of each incarnation of the plate. The individual prints show faint evidence of their predecessors, subverting the accumulative 'states' of the conventional etching process. Each sequence exists as a single edition, a type of monoprint drawing, shown with the plate as an inextricable component that contains each overdrawn layer. The finely detailed drypoint drawings offer an intense energy, depicting both human and landscape subjects. A time-based quality of constant reinterpretation is created, pushing and pulling the spatial proximity and contemplation of the subject, suggesting differing levels of alienation and intimacy.

Artist’s Presentation

Artist’s Presentation

Goodwin's panoramic video and sound installation, Dilate, encircles the viewer with projection screens. By setting the eight visual episodes in different combinations with the eight sound pieces, Dilate expands and contracts our perceptual horizons, heightening the viewer's awareness of physical and psychological space. Panning in and out of significant details of immersive 360 degree scenes, it reflects how our shifting sense of self informs our perception of space and vice versa. Faced with an open vista of a majestic natural landscape, we can feel liberated, isolated or paralysed; as part of the city, anonymous, identified or alienated; in the domesticity of our homes, safe, confined or overwhelmed; in a virtual network, empowered, remote or victimised. Dramatic and multi-faceted in its flow of images, Dilate also has a strong sculptural presence in the gallery, allowing the work to be approached from a distance and viewed both from inside and outside the formation of screens. The shifting soundscape fuses audio recordings captured on location with additional orchestration by the artist. The complete cycle of the sixty-four possible image and sound combinations takes 157 minutes.

The multi-layered images hold an innate serenity in the mesh of overlapped expressions they contain. Snapshots of emotion have been worked over through the act of drawing or painting to imbue each portrait with a level of intimacy reflecting the relationship between Goodwin and the subjects who are all friends or family. The fragility of the lines is sometimes barely visible due to the scale of the paper and the distance at which the viewer is required to stand in order to have an overall sense of the figure and the multifarious stances they have been captured in. The portraits divulge a sense of the time spent studying the facial and bodily gestures of the subjects. The fragments of time captured in the photos are suspended further through the actual duration spent drawing or painting; small details and expressions are given intense concentration. The process of layering is an attempt to contain in a single image more detail about the individual. Although they are all two-dimensional images, each has a different time release as the viewer's focus shifts over time.

The short film Reveal focuses on the evolution of a portrait made on a piece of paper videoed from the fixed viewpoint of a small camera device above a drawing board. The soundtrack plays back the developing conversations and interactions Goodwin had with strangers whom he approached for permission to let him draw their portrait. The video discloses the decision process and accumulation of marks for each drawing as well as the incremental exchange between 'sitter' and 'artist'. This short film comprises of 2 encounters from a larger installation work in which the video of 36 different evolving portraits is projected.

Two Thousand and Three is a filmstrip consisting of that many frames. On each of the individual film frames a different person appears, photographed during the massive protest marches against the war in Iraq, in London, in 2003. The installation presents two copies of the same film, the first copy is seen on the projection screen; the viewer is bombarded by the frenetic forward march of almost subliminal images. The second copy is presented in a light box table; studying the separate frames with a small magnifying loupe, visitors can form a more intimate, contemplative engagement with this series of discrete individuals. A teeming composite of details and fragments, it vividly captures the sense of individuals converging, a part and yet apart.

Reveal consists of three elements, a single screen video projection with accompanying soundtrack and a series of 36 drawings. The video image focuses on the paper and the evolution of each portrait from the fixed viewpoint of a small camera device above a drawing board. The soundtrack plays back the developing conversations and interactions Goodwin has had with each stranger, with the surrounding wild sounds from the environment. The third element is the resulting drawings. Goodwin doesn't often make contact with the strangers he draws in public places. A person on a train may attract his attention by their expression or perhaps the way the light is falling across their face. He may be near by, trying to avoid catching their eye, but often he's drawing them from a distance or drawing their reflection in a window. In contrast in Reveal he introduces himself, declaring his intentions, requesting a time to spend in the individual's company. It is an unusual, even strange request with its own tensions. Goodwin is requesting a brief doorway, to be given permission to look intensely at a stranger. Within the proximity of each encounter the priorities of the drawing process are changed as he simultaneously negotiates a relationship with each individual whilst attempting to harness their likeness. The video recording allows the possibility to resuscitate the drawings reviving the brief relationships formed with each person when both are still full of possible outcomes. The video discloses the decision process and accumulation of marks for each drawing, as well as the incremental exchange between 'sitter' and 'artist'. In Reveal there is an opportunity to unlock the atmosphere of the setting of each of the static drawings on display. This enables the disclosure of the length or brevity, the comfort or discomfort or the success or failure of each encounter. It still remains that many aspects and subtleties of each interaction are concealed or distorted. However, it seems possible that these absences are active spaces for the imagination. Anticipation and speculation combine as each image unfurls gradually like a long photographic exposure.

Above/Below evokes the relationship between public space and private visual encounter. The two screens, positioned horizontally at the top and bottom of the raised platform, project images filmed in Durham Cathedral, one of the largest religious buildings in Europe. The screen below centres around Goodwin's secret observations from the pinnacle of the Cathedral's tower filming through an invisible opening down onto the people and activities moving through the floor area known as "the Crossing". The screen above captures the intensely contrasting light that strikes the Cathedral visitors who glance upwards at the awe-inspiring structure. Goodwin has evolved a language between the camera's movement through space and the soundtrack that suggests different types of contact and exchange between above and below. The public's engagement is an active component of the work, searching for orientation between the two screens. The soundtrack is created from the wild sounds found in the Cathedral with elements of orchestration.

The Body in Architecture conference and publication presented a collection of both theoretical essays and architecture, urban & film based projects. The projects presented in the collection advance new ways of envisaging the city ranging from analytic apparatuses of viewing to design experimentations. The section on film presents innovative interpretations of forms and relations which, in one example, mediates multiple and fluctuating perspectives of space and, in another case, works experimentally through the use of film-making procedures along with more traditional means of architectural representations to plot time-space relations through the mechanism of the 'camera eye'. Contributions include over a dozen theoretical texts by DSD faculty and researchers and international scholars, practitioners and artists such as M. Christine Boyer, Karsten Harries, Anthony Vidler, Warren Neidich, Michael Muller, Scott Lash and an interview with Rem Koolhaas; and nine project contributions from among others, Stefano Boeri and the video artist Dryden Goodwin.

Artist's Presentation

Artist's Preseantation followed by conversation with Tim Marlowe, Nan Goldin and Dryden Goodwin

Goodwin was invited by the singer/songwriter Matt Hales to produce an artwork for the first album of his new act, Aqualung. Goodwin firstly made a pencil portrait of Hales, entitled Matt (2002), as the latest in the series of drawings portraying delicate multi-layered representations of friends and family. This drawing become the key image for the album and inspired the concept for the music video created by Goodwin for the single Strange & Beautiful. Goodwin's aim was to extend the possibilities of the pencil portrait into an animated film that held all of the delicacy, enigma and intricacy of the drawing. The aim of the video was to extend Hales' character into the persona of the song. Through carefully choreographed phases sometimes revealing, sometimes obscuring Hales' features Goodwin draws out and heightens the subtle and shifting emotional expressions in the performance. The resulting 3.47 mins film incorporates hundreds of drawings fused in a finely crafted multi-layered animation.

Artist’s Presentation

Artist’s Presentation, Part discussion around Reality Check

Closer 3, screen video installation with soundtrack 3 screen video installation and soundtrack (2002) 11' 20 Goodwin's 3 screen video installation Closer investigates and subverts the encounters we have with strangers in public places. Using a zoom lens and a long distance laser pen Goodwin collapses the spatial distance between the camera's eye and its subject, filming individuals as he simultaneously touches them with a beam of light. A host of emotional, psychological and sociological implications arise from this act. The ambiguity of these gestures, fluctuating between hostility and empathy, demonstrate both a sense of invasion as well as implying feelings of sympathy towards these individuals. Despite his bold scrutiny of his subjects, in this process of familiarisation and intimacy, Goodwin also seeks to offer them a mysterious protection from the luminary stethoscope by finding vantage points where reflected lights and details of architecture partially obscures their faces.

Artist’s Presentation

Goodwin's short film Closer investigates and subverts the encounters we have with strangers in public places. Using a zoom lens and a long distance laser pen Goodwin collapses the spatial distance between the camera's eye and its subject, filming individuals as he simultaneously touches them with a beam of light. A host of emotional, psychological and sociological implications arise from this act. The ambiguity of these gestures, fluctuating between hostility and empathy, demonstrate both a sense of invasion as well as implying feelings of sympathy towards these individuals. Despite his bold scrutiny of his subjects, in this process of familiarisation and intimacy, Goodwin also seeks to offer them a mysterious protection from the luminary stethoscope by finding vantage points to video where reflected lights and details of architecture partially obscures their faces.

The series of drawings entitled Restaurant, Station, Street and Airport have evolved from a process of tracing groups of multiple projected slides taken in quick succession of four unknown individuals sighted in particular urban spaces. The built up structures of lines form layers of tracing, creating a way of slowing down these fleeting sightings. The process of drawing not only diagrammatically describes the physical space of the figures in the distinctive environments but, due to the inevitable subtle spatial distortions and the layering of each image, they evoke a particular psychological space. The drawings were made concurrently with the development of Closer (short film), (2001).

These 11 individual portraits were selected from a single evening spent photographing unsuspecting passers-by in the same London location. Using the point of a compass as a drawing device, the head and face of each photographic portrait has been traced in scratches. The net like matrix of lines that develops over the faces of the individuals acts simultaneously as a device to reveal the underlying physical structure yet also to protect and shroud the individual from the onlooker's gaze. The hesitant and almost tender touch of the scratched tracings has the paradoxical effect of distorting the individual's surface expression. Goodwin extends the moments caught within each image by the double process of photographing and then retracing these individuals. '(Goodwin's work portrays) the constant relationship we have with the anonymous other...voyeurism as caress, surveillance as intimacy.' Richard Dyer CONTEMPORARY Magazine (Issue Feb. 2002)

The multi-screen video installation Wait takes as its starting point the dramatic tension that surrounds the build up towards the moments when the last millennium changed into the present one. The work explores the continual universal desire to find significance and look constantly for the moment of change. Goodwin captures images of individual's participating in real-life situations, some mundane some more significant, such as a football fan waiting for his team to score, a groom waiting to say "I do", or a relative waiting at an airport arrival gate. The tri-parteid emotional structure of each of these events -anticipation, realisation and aftermath - is used by Goodwin as the blueprint to set up a matrix of emotional states. The projections of these individuals are in cropped close-up, focusing on their facial expressions and reactions. With a reduction of contextual reference points the imagination of the spectator is activated as they try to assimilate and understand the transformation of feelings that the individual undergoes. Goodwin interferes with these durations of time, exploring the ways our mind can bend time depending on our condition. When we 'will' a moment to come quicker, time appears to pass more slowly; yet if we seek to prolong a moment we become acutely aware of the speed at which it passes. By subverting the linear drama of these events through digital manipulation, Goodwin makes time more elastic. After stretches of time just waiting, we jump back and forth over the threshold of the critical moment, accentuating the dramas of the people we are looking at and involving our innate fascination and curiosity for other people. As with a number of Goodwin's recent works, Wait manipulates the relationship between the viewer and the viewed through the use of the zoom of the video camera to set up a singular contact between the two that is a strange balance between distance and intimacy. Spatial distance and optical proximity create an effect that goes beyond documentation giving the viewer a powerful sense of personal involvement as the camera becomes a psychological probe. Wait has evolved as the third part in a trilogy of video installations, including About (1998) and Within (1998). Each investigates the dynamics of urban public environments exploring the way we look at others and are in turn watched ourselves. As the spectator of Wait moves around and amongst the suspended groupings of screens, they are able to interact at close-quarters with the various micro-narratives occurring simultaneously. The images are set within a multi-layered soundtrack of Goodwin's own composition. The elements of the soundtrack, its recurring, shifting cycle of development, crescendo and recapitulation act as a counter point both of compliance and contradiction to the structuring of the pictures. Between the visual and aural are possibilities for extended fictions evolved from the original slices of fact.

Artist's Presentation as part of Video Positive Festival.

2nd in a series of works the first being Suspended Animation - 26 Drawings of the Same Photograph 1998. The work consists of 29 drawings of the same photograph. The drawings are presented in two forms alongside each other. (1) The framed drawings in a long continuous horizontal line around the gallery space. (2) As a video animation where the 29 drawings are transferred to video, one drawing appearing for one frame and then looped in a continuous animation.

Further exploring our innate curiosity and fascination for other people, and the contact possible through looking, Goodwin has created the three sequences of images, entitled Drawn to Know, in which he works with photographs of strangers he has taken surreptitiously in public spaces. These individuals have been caught at moments of introspection. Approaching these small portraits, the viewer becomes aware of how Goodwin has traced and worked with the contours and subtleties of the individual heads and faces, replacing each original photograph, eventually totally working over them with drawing done with a digital stylus and tablet. In Drawn to Know - 14 X Woman fourteen frames, taken from video footage tracking a woman as she is passed by, are closely examined. In the matrix of drawn marks Goodwin holds and considers this fleeting encounter longer. In an attempt to discover, and make familiar, these tracings simultaneously create a fictionalisation of each character. As with Drawn to Know - 6 X Man where he traces the same photograph six times delicately shifting the quality of the man's character each time. Furthermore as with Drawn to Know - 12 X People the viewer moves along the sequence involving themselves with each individual, starting their own unique speculation about, for example, factual details such as age, where each individual may come from, their profession, as well as assessing them physically and emotionally. The veil of drawn marks imposed on these people by Goodwin complicates and distorts the usual dynamic between a viewer and the person in a portrait photograph. The drawing on these photographs acts as an ever present remnant of Goodwin's own time investment, a by product of the processes of thought about these essentially unknowable individuals.

A large video projection, shown at night on the front of the gallery. The video is accompanied by a soundtrack amplified into the background sounds of the city. The footage concentrates on various sightings of spaces through windows, caught on camera, viewed momentarily, late at night, from a moving nightbus. Individuals, groups and empty spaces, held on a few frames of videotape are digitally manipulated, creating a strange, slow motion. By manipulating these found situations Goodwin plays with the relationship of documentor and storyteller. Goodwin's installation conveys a voyeuristic quality that is rendered especially powerful and direct by his rare but bold use of colour. The treatment of the filmed episodes draws the viewer into a complicit relationship with the camera's prying gaze, pandering to innate human curiosity into the privacy of other people's habitats. This central tension is further agitated by the orchestrated soundtrack that Goodwin has created. Over the course of the whole cycle he fuses different sound pieces with the same images, shifting the viewers reading of each situation.

Drawing project for Edition 8 of the art Journal COIL

Artist's Presentation

Artist’s Presentation

Within considers the contents of short everyday encounters, captured as moving vignettes, while Goodwin travels on different modes of transport, through different urban environments. The piece draws on the potential for multiple interpretation of each small gesture and glance, commonly experienced but ignored in everyday life. In his recent video installation About (1998), Goodwin exploits these notions along a linear time structure. Following this mode, Within delves further into the nature of these fleeting relationships as the camera exaggerates the way we watch others and are in turn watched ourselves. Isolating these experiences allows them to be examined as artefacts or curiosities. By repeating, looping, reversing, slowing down and speeding up these pockets of time, the treatment becomes non-linear. The soundtrack with its changing motifs is also played in a loop, setting different movements against different encounters, enriching the matrix of interpretation.

This multi-media installation was created in response to the large warehouse space of Berry House, Clerkenwell, London. The cavernous, hangar-like space lent itself to works which revisited the ideas of airports and flight. The positioning of the three works is key to the show and the dynamics that arise between the various components as described below... One Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety Eight (1998) 16mm film loop A 16mm film loop consisting of that many frames, each frame containing a different aeroplane fuselage, filmed from beneath in close proximity as the aircraft take-off and land. The film is suspended in a rectangular formation in the space and fed through a projector. The projector is tilted so that the image is angled above the viewer on a large screen. The installation of the film loop creates a shift in scale between the miniature aeroplanes on the film itself moving around the space and the large scale of the projected image. The projector used to show the work is slowed down to run at 12 p.s. Suspended Animation - 26 drawings of the same photograph (1998) Twenty six self-portrait pencil drawings of the artist (aged 26 at the time of making the work) are transferred onto video, sequenced in different orders and looped. Each of the 26 drawings is based on the same photograph of the artist and is held for the duration of a frame's length. The work is exhibited on a monitor placed on a specially designed plinth that mirrors the height of the artist to create a life-sized, continuous, suspended animation. Drawn from Memory (1998) (Flick book - pencil on paper) Hand drawn flick book, with one hundred aeroplanes drawn from memory, drawn from the perspective of looking up at the aeroplanes as they pass closely above.

'.....Dryden Goodwin's three screen video installation, About, uses footage he has shot as he drifts around the city on trains, buses, by barge and on foot - evoking their temporal qualities of observation. His camera gently pries and occasionally intrudes into people's lives as both the artist and his subjects move through the urban environment, briefly encountering one another and then fading off into the multifarious city. He tests out who can be approached with the camera and who he needs to shy away from, offering up different qualities of engagement and empathy with each person. Goodwin uses these reactions to the camera and the fleeting relationships we develop with one another when out in the public domain. He emphasises our relationships with strangers and the ambiguities of gesture and movement we interpret from them with his use of sound, combining recordings created on the spot with his own orchestration. The sound track is in four parts creating a fluctuation of moods influencing our reading of the situation. The sound interacts in different combinations with the work's four visual phases, inflecting them with different meanings. The work creates a sense of yearning and loss in our wanderings as we spend a brief period of time with each person; each vignette playing its part in creating a whole, almost epic, narrative of movement, attachment and interpretation. Goodwin is preoccupied with the inhabitants of the city and the frustration at their essential unknowability as people come and go in such vast numbers we hardly know how to orientate ourselves to them. He emphasises a punctuating sense of loss as we pass people, catching their eye, knowing we'll probably never see them again, yet still creating imaginary lives for them in an empathetic act that reveals our fascination for others. Goodwin's work highlights how our innate curiosity and voyeuristic desires become scattered through the city as we absorb an astonishing amount of detail about one another in order to weave narratives, making the unknown, in some way, familiar......' Extract from Catalogue essay by Simon Wallis, Curator of 'Paved With Gold', Kettles Yard, Cambridge, 1998

An experimental documentary film, made in a provincial general hospital in Italy. The film moves through different areas and departments of the hospital, examining both functional and emotional structures. Strains of music are orchestrated with sounds found in the hospital, and juxtaposed against images to shape the varying rhythms of the film. Conversation fragments pepper the soundtrack with different perspectives on the hospital. In the film the human body is set against the support but also the intrusion of technology. The film's sense of time is unpredictable, often suspended in an even pace, anticipation may flip into crisis at any moment, or ease into a sense of resolve. The complexities of relationships between the range of people in the hospital is explored, also the nature of their physical and mental contact. A sense of vulnerability is engendered in the viewer as extreme situations are compressed within the sequence of interlocking episodes. 'Goodwin visually catalogues the tensions of the hospital a place simultaneously hopeful and fatalistic. The film is suffused with lives at very different stages: some just beginning to unfold, some ebbing, as the camera zooms into patients' rooms from the outside, emphasising emotional displacement, human presence and visible pain. The morbid finality of the stainless steel clad autopsy room, with its laid out cadaver, is redeemed with a romantically metaphysical image from the hospital helicopter taking off like a departing soul, offering a bird's eye view of the city.' (quoted extract written by Simon Wallis in catalogue of Dryden Goodwin : Recent Video Works)

Originally filmed in late August and early September 1997, The installation presents a 16mm film loop and a light box. Both works process and present the same black and white 16mm film strip in different ways. The length of film used is exactly 1,997 frames long, each frame containing a different individual photographed around the Royal Palaces, in London, in the few days after the death of The Princess of Wales. One Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety Seven (film loop) (1997) The film strip is looped through a projector and run through hooks in a rectangular formation around the gallery. The images are projected directly onto the wall. The projector is situated close to the wall, rendering the images small, bright and intense. The collection of individual portraits, in themselves fleeting and insignificant, accumulate to form an epic whole. The work seeks to set up a tension between the recording and presentation of the individual moments and that of the larger historical moment. As the activity of surreptitiously taking the individual photographs was pressurised, so too the viewer struggles to keep pace with the bombardment and frantically paced changes of the film loop. The viewer seems to key into certain individuals who act as triggers to the imagination or memory. The work brings to the fore the intrusive role of the camera. Parallels appear between the photographing of people in mourning and the role of the camera in recording The Princess of Wales' life; prying and occasionally intruding, the camera reveals a range of reactions some indifferent, some uncomfortable, some engaged. One Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety Seven (light box) (1997) The film strip is cut up into individual frames. These tiny transparencies are rearranged from the original lineage in which they were shot. New configurations and groupings of the images are placed between two sheets of glass in the light box, like historical artefacts. The separate frames are re-categorised by locations, expressions and quality of light. Using a small magnifying loupe, hanging by the box, the viewer is able to examine closely the individual portraits, setting up a strange one to one relationship between the viewer and the viewed.

One Thousand, Nine Hundred and Ninety Six, is a 16mm film loop consisting of that many frames, each frame containing a different car, filmed over looking a motorway. A distinctive tension is set up between the projected image and the transparent image of the visible film material itself, giving the viewer two opportunities to view the separate frames. The projected image shines directly onto a wall, it is small bright and intense in colour. There is an agitation within the projected moving amalgam of cars, as certain colours and brands are momentarily recognised but continually renewed. Although it is possible to try and view a particular car again the film keeps moving as it makes its way through hooks suspended over 40 feet around the room.

Heathrow (1994) contains the fantasy of flight and escape in an environment that tries to normalise what is, in fact, extraordinary. Narrative vignettes concentrate on passengers moving around the airport terminal while the warm grainy film quality gives this airport a luminosity, reflecting the mindset of the traveller. The sky is depicted as a form of mystic space where we might undergo a loss of self or become overwhelmed by elemental fear in the blue void. This meditative quality is ripped through by the palpable roar of a plane passing overhead. The camera witnesses passengers' ant-like comings and goings; their countenances conveying a sense of purpose, confusion or the joy of homecoming and reunion. In this early work Goodwin already uses the formal elements of video to poetic affect and he has sought out a place that allows this formalism to become more than the sum of its parts in grasping the genius loci of the airport. (extract written by Simon Wallis in catalogue from Dryden Goodwin : Recent Video Works)

Quentin Cooper - presenter of BBC Radio 4's weekly The Material World, chaired this special event taking place on the roof terrace in proximity to Richard Wilson’s Hang On A Minute Lads, I’ve Got A Great Idea... This lively debate considered the physiology of balance and poise, including discussion of the aesthetic qualities of sport/ dance (grace and presence) before moving on to consider neurological skill development in athletes. It featured a dance performance by Subathra Subramaniam, contributions from neuro-scientist Morten Kringelbach, Rambert’s scientist-in-residence Nicky Clayton, as well as dance-scientist Elsa Bradley and Everything Flows artists susan pui san lok and Dryden Goodwin. The discussion was followed by an opportunity to meet the speakers.

Book published to accompany a solo show.

A small bio and summary of Goodwin's practice. For the Artist's Dictionary.