You never quite know what to expect from the Jerwood Drawing Prize show. One year, the changing committee of judges will stick hard and fast to artists who make drawings in the usual sense - marks on paper, that sort of thing - the next year, the show will be over­whel­med with work that, however far you widen the de­fin­i­tion of the drawn, falls into other cat­egor­ies, from sculpture to new media and all points in-between.

This time, the selection panel, faced with the un­en­vi­able task of whittling down nigh on 3,000 an­ony­m­ously submitted entries into the shortlist of eighty-seven pieces that make up this show, have managed to strike a balance between the two extremes, including artists that push hard at the boun­d­ar­ies of the form, and work that lies firmly within the drawing tradition. The judges - Paul Bon­aven­tura of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, art historian Catherine de Zegher and artist Avis Newman - have also quietly teased out themes in con­tem­por­ary drawing practice, placing like artists with like, with the result that the exhibit takes on the feel of a con­ver­sa­tion about the state of drawing today between the artists who practice it.

The first striking piece on show comes from two artists who have put down their pencils and picked up a computer, Sean O’Keefe and Steve Bullock. How to Draw a Cowboy, is a pseudo-sci­en­ti­f­ic, vaguely retro digital display that sees points, labelled ‘gun’ or ‘spur’ track, leaving coloured trails, until the just-re­co­g­n­is­able cowboy dissolves away. It’s a game attempt to draw the passage of time. The best of the animators took prizes. Student Prize-winner Daisy Richard­son’s Sublime Climes is a de­light­fully am­a­teur­ish stop-motion collage, that tran­s­forms images torn from magazines into a concise geo­lo­gic­al history of an imagined world. Melanie Jackson’s A Global Po­s­i­tion­ing System, which won First Prize, has a similar eco­lo­gic­ally-aware edge. It opens with a man ordering a GPS unit from a down-market gadget mag, then tracks the product from assembly line to delivery by courier. Wittily political, and rendered in a light, naive cartoon style, Jackson’s piece is good, but visitors could be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at a digital animation scooping the top honours.

Still within the fold of drawing, but adopting in­nov­at­ive ap­proaches, are the artists who have turned to new processes. Second Prize-winner Brighid Lowe has filled a large sheet of paper with dense ho­r­i­zont­al lines for Rain Drawing (1) before, as the title suggests, letting a downpour finish her piece with damp dots and spots. Tim Knowles made his Tree Drawing by affixing a pen to the branch of Scots Pine, ab­dic­at­ing artistic re­s­pon­s­ib­il­ity to the wind, which made a series of finicky marks.

There seems, too, to be something of a fad for in­fo­graph­ics. Sophie Horton’s Studio En­vir­on­ment is an em­broid­er­ed chart, with coloured threads tracking the noises the artist heard in her studio, while Susie Parfitt crafts a complex, in­com­pre­hen­s­ible graph of decisions taken according to unnamed ‘policy options’. John Holden provides a minimal coun­ter­point, his Grid 2 a precise set of vertical lines and nodes, a soft sug­ges­tion of ordered in­form­a­tion.

On the sculp­tur­al front, Luke Drodz has drilled through a Pelican Books paperback, Art In England, stuffing the off-cut discs into a frame beside the de­sec­rated text. More subtly, Mitsuko Hoshino’s Air (Lotus Pond) has leaves sketched on folded paper, sim­u­lat­ing ripples in water.

Last but not least: the drawings. Minho Kwon stands out with My Brand New Camera Phone, in which a giant cherub enclosed in a neo­clas­sic­al aircraft topped with coffee-cup chimneys prods at sprites buffeted by smoke from an oil well fire, and the Student Prize-winning Koreas_­Man­soodea Shopping Centre, a strange hint of the Korean peninsula unified by commerce, brand names plastered over the ar­chi­tec­tur­al plans for the South side of the mall, a Dear Leader dom­in­at­ing the North.

Her technical drawing style is matched by Patrick Gilmartin, whose pencil work on mylar seems to be the plans for a product of unknown purpose. Ross Jones’ Refuge, meanwhile, sees an en­cam­p­ment of tents set in a tundra of white paper, each one different to the next, making for a truly en­gross­ing work. Tone Holmen provides another imagined world in Coast­lines, with coastal features haphaz­a­rdly overlaid to form an im­pos­s­ible fjord-filled geography. And then there’s Paul Westcombe. His display of used coffee cups, their exteriors covered com­p­letely in tiny murals, at first look like idle doodles, but lean closer, and you’re faced with a beau­ti­fully drawn, deeply perverse world in microcosm, full of fevered psycho-sexual ima­gin­ings, some that will shock even the most jaded gallery-goer.

There is some chaff in amongst all this wheat, sure, but overall, this is a valuable survey of current drawing practice, and a show that not only presents the best of con­tem­por­ary drawing, but questions the nature of the art form.

This review was first published in The Herald on December 14th, 2007.