Nicky Coutts

With cameras banned from English courts, court artists are employed to visually describe scenes in high profile trials. Forbidden to make preparatory sketches, they must instead commit an entire detailed scene to memory to draw later. Coutts invited former court artist Sian Frances to participate in this project.

During Coutts’ discussions with Frances, someone Coutts knew committed a murder, was arrested and remanded in custody. Based on internet pictures of his arrest, Coutts found a lookalike and re-enacted a sequence of images of the murderer being taken from the relative privacy of a police van into the full glare of media attention and public view. The re-enactment took place at Lincoln’s Inn in the central landscaped area that connects lawyers’ chambers. Frances memorised Coutts’ reenacted scene, as she was used to doing in court, and drew them later on the lawyer’s headed notepaper fro chambers at Lincoln’s Inn which had originally been requested for Mimics 1.

See related series Mimics 1 and Mimics 3.