Robyn Penn's Hold Time

Artfull artist Robyn Penn is a finalist of the 2022 Parkin Drawing Prize, Aotearoa New Zealand’s premier award for drawing in all its forms. Penn is nominated for her work Hold Time (2022), defined by the artist as:

A beetle trapped in amber, a cloud held in time. This is a drawing of erasure in which powdered graphite is spread on the paper surface to be manipulated, pushed, pulled and erased until the cloud emerges through a fog of uncertainty. The paper is then immersed in a pool of wax so that the cloud is preserved. It glows and shimmers from within as if it is something remembered; something in another world.

We have lost our bearings; set adrift in an era that has seen every millimetre of the Earth Google-mapped and controlled. There is no Terra incognita anymore. The last continent to be discovered is Time. The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. As I gaze at the sky my imagination is awed by the slow work of nature through countless millennia and I want to hold time, to pause entropy, preserve this moment.

Penn’s is a mindful approach, motivated by a quiet contemplation of and appreciation for the environment. The artist finds her subject in her South African heritage, where the landscape was demarcated not by bodies of water or abounding mountains but by plumes of clouds, bursting across the sky above her childhood home. Penn’s practice traverses painting, print-making and drawing, straddling realism and abstraction to produce works of great emotional potency.

In Hold Time, we see only the tip of a great cloud before it dissolves, scattering itself into the surrounding sky. The scene is calm yet charged, the cloud’s power uninhibited by the drawing’s muted palette. The immersion of the paper in wax yields a damp effect, as if the paper itself has been rained on. The muddied picture plane creates affectual space for the viewer to feel the simultaneous weight and weightlessness of the scene.

In Hold Time, there exists a tension between preserving nature and embracing its temporalities, between capturing the cloud and letting it drift away. Penn speaks of a desire to ‘hold time, to pause entropy, preserve this moment.’ In this work Penn has done more than preserve the moment. She has preserve the feeling of the moment, the sensations that come with it. And that is a moment’s true value.

All works nominated for the 2022 Parkin Drawing Prize will be showcased at the Parkin Drawing Prize exhibition at the NZ Academy of Fine Arts from August 2 to September 11. The winning submission will be selected and announced at the gala announcement of the Parkin Drawing Prize exhibition on Monday, August 1, 2022.