Degree: Fine art
University: Arts university Bournemouth
Graduation Year: 2023
Alfie Van Veen's observational drawings catalogue the passage of time - or, more specifically, how time is expressed through space. Producing repetitive drawings whose only differences are the age of their subjects, his output is akin to a scientific study, whilst functioning at the same time as a meditation on change. Absorbed by the ordinary process of ages undergone by organic matter such as fruit and flowers, these pieces bend the boundaries of what we might consider a 'still life', perhaps a 'still death', or 'changing life' might be more apt. Evidence of change is written in brown spots, wilting, ordinary chemical and biological processes themselves becoming at once the object of study and a way of measuring time - one that is measured not in days, but in its own evidence.
Richard Waring, Course Leader BA (Hons) Fine Art Degree BA MA SFHEA:
'This impressive series of drawings indexes the effects of time and light on familiar domestic objects. The meticulously disciplined drawings document the temporal scales of entropy in organic and man-made materials.'
In my practice I use observational drawing to reveal the ways time is expressed in space through organic subjects such as fruit, flowers, foliage and less organic subjects like a sugar cube dissolving or a reflective can. I make repeated drawings of a single subject viewed from the same position over a period of time. Each series of observations, when viewed as a whole, reveals the changes in light, form and colour that embody the ways time is expressed within physical space. I measure space with my pencil plotting the distances between points in my subject’s form to produce an image that is both true to a moment and repeatable in its method of production. This rhythmic mode of production using focused and obsessively repeated measurement begins to feel almost mechanical in its order and repetition and the subject’s expression of time comes to dominate my sense of time like a clock, through its changes and cycles over the period of observation.