Reveal (2003) video, soundtrack and 36 drawings
(6 hours 32 minutes)

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.
 
Commissioned by Picture This, Bristol and South West Screen