Jeanette Barnes 'Time and Tide'

London – an ever evolving city. With over 250 new tower blocks planned, the skyline is constantly in motion as animated cranes perform above whilst below people go about their day, unknowingly interacting with the architecture around them.

Jeanette Barnes has, for the past 25 years, been capturing the city of London’s boundless energy through her drawings. Often vast in scale, they engage with the continual development of the urban environment and its relationship with those who inhabit it. In contrast to the frantic scenes that they depict, Jeanette’s drawings evolve gradually over time, the ebb and flow of information, akin to a passage of time, developing until the drawings outcome is found.

Her most recent work has taken her further into the depths of time, moving away from the familiar contemporary London to an exploration into its history, hidden and preserved amongst the river beds of the Thames. Everyday artefacts, carefully selected for their resonance, from specific sites along the Thames, St Paul’s, the Globe Theatre and Shad Thames, are reinterpreted. Their simplistic beauty highlighted and through integrating these objects into her work, Jeanette reconnects them with the present London.

Time and Tide brings these two bodies of work together for the first time, contrasting the activity and timespan of contemporary London with that deeper sense of history that London’s rivers maintain to re-frame our view of then and now.

Jeanette Barnes studied fine art at the Royal Academy followed by Printmaking at the Royal College of Art. She has exhibited in many solo shows and group including several times at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and the Jerwood Drawing Prize Exhibition. She has been awarded various scolarships and prizes, most recently the Hugh Casson Drawing Prize at the 2013 RA Summer Exhibition. Jeanette has taught at the Royal Drawing School for a number of years and has been a tutor on the Royal Academy Outreach Programme for over twenty years.