The starting point for the new work I am going to develop are photographs. Photos that I find in my immediate environment, for which I draw from an archive that I build up through my observation walks in the area. Photos that I take myself of models from the area and find on the internet. Photos that connect with the history of the place where I work as an artist-in-residence and have a close connection with women in this current time. These images and their story form the starting point for my drawings, paintings and installations. 

I will observe women in their actions, in their comings and goings.

The title of my project teken de tijd, refers to the act of drawing in relation to time, the past, the present and the future. I don’t want my project to just be a nostalgic experience, but to bring it into the present. A confrontation or meeting of the present and the past. 

A journey of discovery for a translation that fits well with the content of my work and the transformation of my drawings into a site-specific, three-dimensional work. I also hope to gain more knowledge of materials and techniques that serve the content of my work. On site, in the residency and its surroundings, I will delve further into topics and themes that I come across, that touch me, and work from there on a series of drawings. 

Rolina Nell
www.rolinanell.nl

I’m a visual artist and graphic designer based in Cairo, Egypt. My work usually explores issues of body and space, and how each one influences the other.

As a graphic designer, I use visual communication as a tool for advocacy and provoking social change. In 2016, I joined Visualizing Palestine, a small team that uses research and design to visually communicate the Palestinian narrative. Throughout my work with VP, I delve into themes of infrastructure and geography of apartheid, as well as building solidarity between the Palestinian movement and other social justice movements worldwide.

As a visual artist and writer on the other hand, I tend to focus on the more personal and intimate stories. I work with a variety of mediums including: drawing, printmaking, photography, and video. I am currently exploring different forms of visual essays, using a combination of images and words to follow a thread that weaves ideas together through a stream of consciousness.

Yosra El Gazzar

My work explores the translation of metaphysical ideas into visual narratives through a blend of photography, sculpture, digital, and mechanical mediums. 

Despite my technological bent, drawing and painting remain a central component of my artistic development, serving as a bridge between my technical skills and creative ambitions. 

This blend of interests has led me to pursue this drawing residency, aiming to explore mechanical painting as an evolution of the quest for automatism in art - a movement that sought to capture nature's essence mechanically, marking a significant departure from mere photographic replication towards recognising mechanical drawing/painting as a unique art form. 

My proposal for this residency involves a series of experimental projects utilising a custom-built, portable painting machine capable of executing pre-programmed paintings, capturing dynamic scenes over time in a manner reminiscent of Monet's haystacks, and allowing for spontaneous "freestyle" sessions to capture specific scene elements. These experiments are designed to push the boundaries of mechanical painting, challenging traditional perceptions and exploring the medium's potential across a range of styles, from Impressionism to Cubism. 

By doing so, I aim to demonstrate the versatility and depth of mechanical painting, situating it as a legitimate continuation of the historical quest for automatic art. This exploration is particularly poignant in today's era, where the delineation between human and machine contributions to art is increasingly blurred, necessitating a broader understanding and appreciation of mechanical painting's capabilities beyond its conventional confines.

Influenced by a diverse array of figures across art, science, and literature, I am driven by a desire to engage with the complex interplay between these disciplines, seeking to contribute to the ongoing dialogue around the evolution of art in the age of technology.

Lening Hou

I see my work as a continuous engagement and exploration of the flow between art and everyday life.  

Having been a French expatriate for the past 17 years, I intend to transform such an opportunity into a series of works investigating my relationship to my birth country and also the impact time has on physical and mental spaces. I will investigate the relationship between body language, written language and mark making.

I would continue investigating a primary concern that permeates my practice; the experience of embodiment, of being, having and inhabiting a body. The body as both subject and object. It is exciting to draw without a defined purpose or end product in mind - without trying to draw a ‘thing’ but to express something I feel. There is fear and resistance in this freedom, and therefore prompts something to confront. The tension inherent in attempting to draw this way focuses on sensorial phenomena within the body. My interest in psychoanalysis has drawn me to research the impact of past experience and trauma in the body/mind dynamic, and attempt to visualise these concepts that exist beyond the representational. Evocative language used to describe phenomena of the psyche often uses metaphoric allusions to the topography, anatomy and biology of the body, and inspires a visceral response. My creative practice is an attempt to communicate this through drawing and materialised in sculpture. My ambition during this residency is to see where drawing could lead when freed from a propositional relationship to my sculptural practice. 

Performative embodiment has connected me deeply to my past, and I reveal the body as an archive of our ancestry interconnected with our own lived experience. Evocations transmitted across generations are experienced as unlocatable, unspeakable, pre-conscious; the unthought-known. The body, in which we feel all emotions and bears the scars of life, can be experienced as a burden, unruly, and in discord with the self. A public but also deeply private object, we might wish to escape entrapment by flights of fancy, fracture and psychic dissociation. My work has evolved into creating hybrid forms and fragmented parts, that express these conflicts, hovering between growth and decay, beauty and abjection. 

Inherent to the mechanics of drawing is the engine of the body as the tool for mark making and so has the potential to be both creative and destructive, the source and limit of all expression. I would hope to push these to their extreme. I propose a practice where repeated cycles of research, movement and drawing become reflective and responsive to each other, experimenting with unfamiliar materials, processes and scale of drawing along the way. I am excited to expand drawing, employing my interest in scenography to present the work in dynamic ways. I propose an organic and open-ended process, an alchemical exchange between body, mind and environment recorded in a drawing practice. 

I will be working towards creating drawing installations that engage with the liminality of hypnagogia and, more broadly, with (day)dream/sleep experiences. In this context, I wish to push my drawing practice beyond two-dimensionality and construct hybrid “environments” where mark making is not confined to paper but extends to include sound and moving image.

My intent is to draw focusing on the spaces shaped by somatic experiences encountered during pre-sleep states and in this context experiment with new processes and materials. While transcribing the dream or pre-dream experience on to paper through the immediacy and flow of pencil marks, I want to infuse drawing with the plasticity of sculpture, the kinetic of the moving image and the enveloping nature of sound. 

Through this residency, I aim to push the boundaries of my work, exploring new dimensions and scales. I envision embarking on a transformative journey where drawing, research, and action converge harmoniously.

By embracing the ethos of DRAW and amplifying my artistic explorations, I hope to emerge not only with refined artistic outcomes but also with a deeper understanding of drawing's multifaceted impact.

OPEN CALL 2023 

AiR DRAWinternational
Drawing research centre
Caylus, Tarn and Garonne, Occitanie, France 

Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse and DRAWinternational, already partners in the curation of exhibitions of works from the collections of the Abattoirs, are joining forces in 2023, for the second consecutive year, to host a residency for an artist primarily from Ukraine or Russian dissident to affirm their solidarity with artists suffering from the war.

DRAW - drawing, research, action and works 

The centre is a place for research, experimentation and production of drawing in all its forms, which examines concepts, methods and significance of material within the discipline of contemporary drawing and encourages the sharing and exchange between the artist and the public.
DRAW hosts international artists who, for several weeks, take possession of the studios to reflect, experiment and create works. DRAW's support is both practical and theoretical at the heart of contemporary thinking. 

Workshop - Accommodation 

The artist has a studio and independent accommodation in a medieval building in the centre of the village. Additional facilities include large format space, technical workshop, etching press, top loading oven and technical support. Internet access via Wifi for personal laptops. A gallery space for works in progress or completed works is also available where appropriate. 

An evening meal is provided by the centre for all artists once a week and artists are taken on cultural visits in relation to their particular projects. 

Duration of residency 

8 weeks from October 2023 

Fees and support 

Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie covers the cost of the residency for 8 weeks (studio and accommodation), travel to Caylus and a €2,000 creation grant - this does not include meals. 
The artist is supported in their integration into the community. The center organises and promotes Open Studios events and supports the editing and translation of written texts. It offers internet access (wifi) for personal laptops and offers cultural visits.

Residency Restitution 

Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie will organise an exhibition of the work produced during the residency at the Galerie des publics des Abattoirs, in Toulouse, in January 2024.

Application requirements: 

1. A portfolio of recent work which includes a short biography.
2. A statement of intent for the residency - project proposal.

Please send your application in French or English before 1st June, 2023 to
emmanuelle.hamon@lesabattoirs.org

This process will inform new artistic investigation of current ecological processes and patterns. Part of this creative investigation will be to tease out the limits of drawing as a diagrammatic process that can be re-visualized as a new responsive social praxis based on the concepts of systems theory and cybernetics. 

The proposed work will re-locate ‘drawing’ within the field of the ‘diagram’ in order to open a new framework for artistic practice. The academic area in which I have located this research is not typically to be found in the visual arts, but within the disciplines of science, mathematics and communicational practices that are essential to the theories and principles of systems found in General Systems Theory and Cybernetics and whose influence in diagrammatic practice has historically being overlooked. 

I am also interested in how a systems diagramming process, can facilitate a new creative platform, from which to develop a discursive exchange between, on the one hand the action of drawing, and on the other it’s potential as a communicative social and research device. 

As an artist, I work with various media that range from two-dimensional work to sculpture, video, installation, and performance. However, all of my practice is ultimately based on drawing, and more precisely on its expanded notion. For me, “drawing” is like a process of excavation, aimed at exploring the interconnection between drawing and language. 

I currently work as an associate professor at the Tokyo University of the Arts, where I teach experimental drawing in the Graduate School of Fine Art’s course “Global Art Practice” (GAP). I am also the founder of the international platform “Drawing Tube”, a collective dedicated to alternative drawing research and practices. 

In 2019, after the opening of my solo exhibition in Montpellier, I took the opportunity and visited the Pech Merle cave to see its ancient drawings. It was one of the most inspiring moments of my life. Since I grew up near an excavation site in the suburbs of Tokyo, archaeology has been a great interest of mine since childhood, and surely this had an impact on my artistic practice. I shall add that my drawing practice is also inspired by space science, particularly by its quest into the past and future of things. 

Lines are all about relations between points. Throughout human history, drawing has always functioned as a linkage between two points – such as past and future, inside and outside, light and shadow, human and non-human. Thus lines, for me, work like “tubes”: they connect spheres of experience thanks to the traffic of information that travels through them. 

It is precisely this concept of “tube” that helps me explore, or I would say “excavate”, what I see as the nature of drawing. More specifically, my focus is on exploring the dimension of one specific “tube”, the one that universally connects drawing and writing in this present world.

In his book “Lines – a brief history”, Tim Ingold noted that writing originally referred to incisive trace-making. The Old English term “writan” meant “to incise runic letters in stone”. If the derivation of the word “writing” means to make a mark in the stone, the two verbs "to draw" and “to write” are then quite entwined. In Japan, there is an ingrained interconnection between “drawing” and “writing” – which generated from the culture of Kanji (pictographic Chinese character). In Japanese, we define both drawing and writing as “Kaku”, and the etymology of “Kaku"(draw/write) is “to scratch”. 

In considering these matters, cave drawings are fascinating because they give us a timeless perspective. The famous animal paintings and the “negative” hands are next to multiple inscribed signs, or what they call “primal characters”. In Japan, there are caves with pictograms too: so even caves, in themselves, are like sort of tubes, that run underground connecting space-time dimensions.

Hiraku Suzuki

Residency supported by the Agency of Cultural Affaires Japan.

I have been based in Rhode Island, but in the summer of 2023 I began a 60 day, self-guided explorative tour in Portugal and Italy to continue building my understanding of mark in many contexts: creation, corrosion, climate, worship, wear, and weather. 

My time at DRAWinternational will focus on the possibilities within drawing to communicate gesture through intuition. I will be responding to the environment; its color, atmosphere, patterning; exploring mark across context and material. 

Drawing is foundational to my practice; I have been drawing throughout my life. It has become a physical extension of my body in the world. It is intuitive and ongoing; an in real time manifestation of my hand in response to information. 

I'm curious in understanding a mark or material until it becomes a part of my intuitive knowledge, until I approach the surface with complete gesture or until thinking and drawing are one action.

Elexis Van Reen

Making the invisible disaster sensitive and intimate has been one of the main challenges of my artistic approach for nearly 20 years. Drawing with smoke, packing ice cubes, or repairing cracked ice with gold leaf, actions alternately funny, solemn or moving, would perhaps be the flapping of a butterfly's wing, supposed to lead to a lasting transformation of our gaze on the world, to commit ourselves to protecting it.

In a just-in-time and networked world, immersed in the culture of the quickly consumed and the instantaneous, our human traces have become indelible footprints, ecological footprint, climate footprint or carbon footprint.

My work by its ephemeral side, tries to sanctify the moment, the appointment with a work that tomorrow will no longer exist, to give back to the imprint, the fragile and sensitive poetics of a footprint in the snow or of a drawing on a steamy window.

In the perspective of further exploring these patterns of trace and imprint, while keeping as a horizon line the challenge of invisible disasters, drawing and engraving appear to me today as privileged media. Reading the texts of Michael Ferrier is not without connection with my decision to mirror "the drawing" and "the series of curiously elegant, abstract and disembodied environmental disasters, which feed a news item”.

For me, ice is a privileged material with which to question the notion of support in drawing, the fragility of conservation and the problem of erasure, a paradoxical gesture that has become an artistic practice in its own right.

An artist residency such as the one proposed by DRAWinternational, would represent the opportunity to continue, in a workshop that has become a laboratory, my alchemical experiments on fire and ice, in a new direction: that of the drawing left by fire in ice. During this residency my desire would be to mobilize drawing and continue to explore its porosity with other artistic practices such as photography, engraving and animation drawing.

Nadine Soubeyran

In 19th century American society, James McNeil Whistler could draw such a perfect circle that he often left it as his signature in guest books. This stands as a record of Whistler’s eye, mind, and hand working in a way that only he could. Like the individual imagination, drawing can demonstrate who we uniquely are. 

Concept has driven my art making more than media, so I went through my archives to find some aesthetic threads. Most of my drawings are made during summer travels. I see an attention to the landscape, the color green, the chaotic rendering of plant life. 

Out of the four functions of drawing, I favor drawing as expression and drawing as understanding, or meaning making. As an urban person, a connection to nature, an attention to the interstitial spaces, inspire me.. 

I would like to unify my experiments into a series of large-scale drawings, an invitation to be seduced by the beauty to be found in twisting, growing, blooming, and wilting plant life.The project may become about regeneration or conservation. In order to save a given thing, one has to notice, know the name, and acknowledge its place in the too-large-to-comprehend order of things. 

Time and space would let me spend time with artists who have achieved similar goals. Mary Delany (18thc) Tacita Dean (21c) and...well, I lose the names I collected in museum visits. American culture compartmentalises botanical drawing and certainly rewards a limited approach to fine art. Because of the dominance of the “white cube,”I respect folk artists and children because art should be for all people to create to grow the mind. 

No, I don’t see myself turning into a botanical illustrator (although there are excellent programs at the New York Botanical Gardens). Nor do I want to be seen as untrained. I want to capture what Dürer knew to be true: there is value in attending to what might not be noticed...a flower or a weed has intrinsic value. 

My goal, as it stands now, is to invent gardens, representations that may nod to the Victorian language of flowers but also combinatory un-real plants that imply new forms of life altered in response to a changing climate. I realize that the Muslims are probably right—nature is too perfect to be represented. Therefore, interpretations of non-existent plant life is an open visual discussion. 

Barbara Tversky, professor of cognitive psychology, claims that such sketching is nothing else than the ability of the human mind to extend to an external world and reduce cognitive overload. I it call Metasketching, the art of thinking through sketching.

So what if the cave drawings have nothing to do with spiritual rituals, and they are "just" a result of the externalization of the thinking process. Assuming that, I would love to explore how we can similarly use drawing: to think through the strokes and gestures and to reflect on our actual thoughts, memories and experiences. As I've done similar experiments with sketching in a design context, I would love to expand my practical experimentation beyond that. 

In fact, what if use the cave drawings as our reference, as our initial state? So, how symbolic or iconic could our expressions get? How would physical interactions (gestures, strokes) contribute to such externalized thinking? 

These are undoubtedly bold questions, and we may have more of them by the end of the residence. But I believe it is at least an opportunity to test out my Metasketching manifesto: 

Obey the ambiguity

Explore and interact

Let slip the artefact

I am an artist, designer, and researcher who worked on projects such as Terminator: Dark Fate (Tim Miller/Jim Cameron), Love, Death and Robots (Netflix, 2022), and Future Ink (Wacom, Ars Electronica, 2020) or Dubai's museum of the future (Tellart, exhibition research, 2018). My design career started in Skoda Auto, where I worked for seven years, and now his clients' list includes names such as Pilsner Urquell, Scarpar, Nike, Prim and much more. 

Last but not least, I am an academic researcher focusing on mind, creativity, and ideation in the context of design and cognitive sciences, a subject matter of my doctoral studies (ArtD/PhD) at STU Bratislava, Slovakia.

Since 2020, I've been working with the Figurama group, supporting Prof. Boris Jirk? at lectures and workshops, where I talk primarily about the role of the human body in the ideation process.

Miichal Jelinek

My work utilises the medium and process of drawing and collage.  These are most appropriate for conveying an environment in flux and the instability of our climate through their immediacy and malleability.  I compose in fragments, bits and pieces of paper, gestural notations, as well as glimpses of representation imagery.  I pay particular attention to drawing directly from nature, as well as through the material manifestations of memory and imagination in the form of sketching. In times when such traditional processes are neglected in place of new technology, such written and drawn observations continue to be important to me. My approach allows a cognitive mimesis that operates mindfully and speculatively through seeing, thinking, relating and remembering. It is about looking at and looking through the subject at hand.   

The act of construction develops concurrently with the act of drawing. Paper is cut away or added in an unrestricted manner allowing the work to grow and assume its own shape as an installation collage. The repetitive act of drawing and redrawing grows into a rhythmic expanse and a multiplicity of marks which are often in the form of a gesture, a movement that accentuates my body. The resulting work is equally about my presence and my process as well as my subject.  

I deliberately play with ambiguity and uncertainty reflecting the precariousness of our current situation in nature. The resulting images maintain an openness, are never quite fixed and question pre-existing notions of ‘finish’.  They suggest that meaning actually lies ‘in between’, in a state of flux, a transient place as nature itself.

‘Drawing – understood in the widest sense as a linear movement that leaves an impression or trace of one kind or another’

Using Tim Ingold’s generous definition as a touchstone, for me drawing lies in the imprint, the trace of an action, evidence of two materials touching. The moment between: verb and noun, stillness and action, presence and absence.

I am interested in paying attention to draw-ing as gesture and action, to its physical substance and the quality of materials. Working with materials associated historically with drawing - chalk, graphite, ink, charcoal – and beyond, I aim to draw in collaboration with material in a ‘working with rather than a doing to.’

Drawing materials have a history of their own prior the point of draw-ing. According to Timothy Morton ‘there is no such thing as unformatted matter, waiting for someone to stamp a form on it.’ Matter is not inert but in the process of unfolding and becoming. How does noticing the drawing gestures inherent within material effect how we then use it to draw with? How do methods of extracting and combining matter to produce drawing materials mirror the actions we use as artists? 

Locating drawing conceptually in natural objects, - presenting material as material - sculpturally and sonically, I wish to make connections between the embodied actions of the expressive gesture and non-human agents. 

I plan to make work in which the drawings and materials are rooted in the residency location, paying attention to earth, history and landscape. It is an opportunity for me to really interrogate how my practice changes in response to a new environment, and finding new ways of noticing drawing in, and drawing with, the materials available.

Lucy Crouch

Drawing and moving is my initial/primary way of communicating with myself.
It’s writing without words, getting feelings on paper when I don’t have words. Often the words emerge while I draw or move, it leads to more understanding of things that concern me. It’s liberating and last year during the Corona pandemic I had time to make long walks leading to new insights in my process of an artist and more understanding about the rules of life.

The seaside
During the corona lockdown I walked along the Dutch coast line of the North sea, the waves were very rough and high and this brought a huge amount of sea foam on the beach. I was delighted, and started observing the movement from the waves with the foam on top of it. It was moving like jelly pudding. Sometimes the wind blew the foam elsewhere and new clusters arose. It was fascinating, how the wind was constantly sketching the landscape in a new order. When coming home I started to explore how to express my observations. I started drawing in a different way and used my body as a tool in shaping new lines.

The moveable landscape
Nothing stays, everything is constantly changing.
This for me is a new manner of drawing and it gives a sensation of meditation. It brought me to the moment when time no longer mattered and more important for me was, that I was not concerning about what I should draw. I wasn't worried about that it had to be something, I enjoyed the action and the moment and to work with the body as a drawing or eraser tool gives me new ways to explore.

Transforming nature is the base which I want to explore and materialise because of the fast changes due to climate change. Normally the seasons come in a more or less normal moment in a year. I feel and see that things in nature/climate rapidly transform and this gives a lot of disorder and fear in peoples lives and species on earth. Also in mine, so it isn’t only pleasure what I discover from nature, this discomfort will be also a part of my research.

Making observations, meditations from our surroundings and play with this new insights will be the start of my work. With this I want to achieve a more extended way how I look and think about normal things, people art and especially drawing. In order to achieve this, I need to have time to explore my insights in new ways of drawing in a performative way. Performances are in the moment. Drawings exist a bit longer but the idea of working or using my drawings in a time- based way will be also a part of my research.


Nell Berger

I want to explore how the  performativity of  drawing can be communicated.

What is my hand thinking?

My research is a comparative investigation of drawing: gestural mark making, the body, and movement. I explore the relationship of gestural mark making in visual art and I examine cross disciplinary methods in the arts. 

How is a gesture illuminated through the body and how does the performative and choreographic nature of drawing align with this?

My body of works physically depict the corporeal involvement, through tactile kinaesthetic making and thinking through the hand. Often beginning as a series of small dynamic movement studies and drawings, they are arrayed in a linear sequence to animate the movement dynamics of the event.
For me working quickly provides a sense of urgency which becomes liberating and connects to a hidden truth, through the deliberate avoidance of conscious intention. The immediacy of a quick gestural drawing reveals a hidden part of us with each mark that is swiftly scratched on the paper that manifests almost magically. 

Responding and capturing a fleeting moment in time challenges how we relate to each other as we navigate our way through the world. How one responds immediately to a particular situation, to a figure, or an object, exposes a hidden and fragile part of us.  

Emmy Mavroidis

“The Dialectic of Time and Timelessness”

I was a filmmaker and film production professor for many years before I decided to change course and turn to painting and drawing. Why, now, do I feel a very strong pull towards creating what I feel I have been working towards but unable to approach?

I am fascinated by triptychs, polyptychs, altar pieces, Asian screens and works of art that either divide a continuous image or juxtapose images. Perhaps this has to do with my background in film. If you divide a continuous image in three with frame lines between the three parts, for me, the whole feel of the image changes. What was static becomes dynamic. Space seems to flatten even if the image is based on rules of perspective. The flattened space and separations take the now separated images through time, but simultaneously lift the whole piece out of time. I become very engaged in this dialectic.

I have been mainly painting for some years now, using realist and hyper-realist technique. The work is slow and methodical. I am no longer satisfied with my strictly realistic images and have a strong urge to cut loose, working in a less literal and more intuitive and kinetic way, combining elements of abstraction and realism and to use, as an impulse, the theme of time and timelessness.

I would like to make several large scale drawings on paper, at least 80 x 200 cm. I may use figurative images in some, but others may be partially or completely abstract. There will be some sort of sequencing within each of these drawings, with or without visible internal borders. I would like to experiment with speed and stillness both in terms of content and technique and with the idea of movement and pause.

Marjorie Morton

Recently, I have been developing a body of work related to old and classical painting, re-appropriating obsolete subject matters and rethinking them in a more contemporary look. After I have chosen the painting which I would like to work on, I start developing a series of small scale drawings done very meticulously. My intention here is to be as faithful and precise as I can in copying them. At the same time, I work on large scale drawings of the same motif, but here, I let the imagination run wild and try to incorporate my own ideas of this subject matter. I have a predisposition for humorous approaches and often the work becomes a parody of the subject matter which is depicted. 

I use a personal method of collaging, where I superimpose many sheets of paper and cut directly onto the paper. The surface becomes broken and reveals the layers underneath it. I usually use a mix of different materials, such as charcoal, pastel, watercolour and pencil. 

During the residency I want to continue my investigation on iconic and obsolete painting subjects of the past, and create works which are at the same time an homage and a reproach to them.
I intend to take full advantage of the residency by being open to others and the surroundings and hopefully experience a good feeling and excitement to draw. 

The work is created as a response to a self-directed question or to a challenge. 

My proposal for DRAWinternational expands on the theme of personal shame by considering it in the wider context of systemic racism and the privilege of whiteness. In Caylus, I would like to use drawing as a research method to consider the intersection of American history, personal history and psychology. 

I plan to use a practice-based research approach: using drawing, collage, writing and possibly animation to mine personal memories using Jungian-based ‘shadow’ exploration. As I have experienced on previous residencies, the novelty and majesty of the rural French landscape would amplify the potential for self-reflection. 

How has my experience of whiteness shaped my life in America and abroad? 

The unblinking interrogation of my past will be uncomfortable, and I don’t know where it will lead. The personal is political as the exploration of systemic racism in America is as necessary now as it was in 1968. 

I paint and draw the journey of my personal memories and complex inherited stories. It is the experience I have working through the process - the ebb and flow of applied colour, lines made and obscured, observing my emotions visually stated - that is transformative for me. This process stirs a deep inner dialogue and helps me explore and understand the grace of imperfection.

?My work is a visual narrative of my personal journey bringing to light that which is in shadow. It doesn’t want to be invisible; it wants the liberty to engage and be seen. 

I continue to explore the history of memory and shadowed beliefs. We tell ourselves stories to thrive or survive..to make calm out of chaos, safety out of loss. I question those memories and continue to dialogue about them; separating fact from fiction. 

Between the 1930s and 1940s in Australian Art, artists looked towards European Surrealism through the writings and works of André Breton and André Masson and while no artistic movement eventuated, its influence was idiosyncratically captured in their art. Australian artists developed individual hybrid styles and approaches in response to their own culture, history and landscape. No other artist captured this more than the prolific oeuvre of James Gleeson. Gleeson wrote the first text in Australia that identified Australian artists as surrealists: What is Surrealism? Published in Art in Australia in 1940, he states that surrealism... 

“is an attempt, not to abandon reason, but to make reason reasonable-to rejuvenate the concept of reason. It is the fantastic used as a method of elucidation. It aims at a re-orientation of values through a broadening of the concept of reality”. 

Gleeson understood surrealism to be a way of approaching the truth of our humanity... 

“creating a synthesis between the daytime reality of our mind and the darkness of our subconscious world”. 

My practice gains inspiration from my interest in art history and psychological phenomenons. Primarily a painter and drawer, I’m fascinated in drawing as a hybrid medium. For years I’ve struggled to keep drawing and painting separate, finding myself experimenting with this thought in my practice. What interests me is the liminal space between drawing and painting, the process of transitioning, waiting and not knowing where the work will journey. I’m also obsessed with the idea of revelation, between the 'what was' and ‘what becomes next’ and how this informs part of this existential experience. Gleeson similarly explored liminality and has been a key influence on my creative process. 

Traditionally trained to draw, I’ve been working in mixed media to make composite works that resemble a fusion between elements of drawing combined with characteristics of painting. Working in mixed media has become a metaphor approach similar to the idea of gold panning, a surrealist method of sifting the psyche to analyse residual experience to come to a process of realisation through the material itself. 

Emulating this idea in my process, I make works using photomontage clippings honed with different drawing materials, watercolour and gouache. I create what I call “thinking drawings” or “drawing paintings”; drawings that explore patterns of thought as I work, a means of navigating moral and spiritual pathways of the human condition. Drawing becomes a way of seeing - of understanding how my external and internal world cross- pollinate. It’s a vehicle for my mind, body and spirit and an expression about my acceptance of how images are birthed through the material formation itself. 

I wish to further explore these ideas and develop new forms of hybrid drawing approaches into an experimental body of research - perhaps through different materials both developed and/or sourced, and using invented tools and methods. Once discovered, I intend to use these hybrid drawing forms as a catalyst for further research. 

My intention is to create a visual response to each hybrid drawing form (using more traditional methods) documenting my experience of creativity and patterns of thinking as if I was retracing my thought activities whilst making the work (this will be a representation about the preconception of the actual process of what was or could have been the unfulfilled gaps and a memory of my thinking). 

The research will form a body of work becoming a conversation about the unknown through the activity of drawing hybrid forms - a kind of experimental dialogue about flux that represents the multifarious nature of drawing, how it can capture thought processes of both subconscious and conscious states, illustrating patterns of the irrational and rational states of my psyche. 


www.louisachircop.com

I work primarily with charcoal on paper creating large-scale figurative drawings, I have recently been exploring colour and am excited to see where that may take me. 

Through my drawings I try to allude to the complexities and shadows of everyday existence. I depict apparently banal human actions and seek to contemplate and reveal the deeper psychological ambiguities of the human experience.  My drawings of women (often including myself) invite and challenge the viewer to question their role within the scene depicted, quietly exploring the nature of objectification, making the viewer implicit in the work.

I attempt to portray the journey of navigating womanhood in the constantly developing landscape of modern feminism. An exploration of the parameters of authenticity in a heavily commercialised world  presenting femininity as a rebellion against societal expectations and outdated notions of gender norms.

I'm interested in exploring the experience of ‘body’, the experience of drawing itself and the relationship between the two. I am also interested in the controversial charge of separating the definitions between “Pornography” and “Erotic Art”. 

If we don’t become active social activists, at least we need to recognise changes to our daily lives. As an artistic messenger, I am trying to find a lighter more accessible way.

During the residency period I will create a digital drawing picture book of which the concept is the ‘Awakening’ of climate change.

Through my picture books you will see the imbalance we have made and have a moment to think about it. Messages without text can be interpreted and shared as their own stories through experiences and emotions of the person looking at the picture.

The ultimate intent is that we get a positive aspect to see the world and will have hopes again. Through this work, I hope that many people achieve dreams and childhood innocence, positive thoughts and hopes, friendship and sharing, awakening and development.

Sungeun Bae

My most recent work reflects my cultural traditions and East Asian ways of thought and expression. I use pencil to draw human hair, which is a subject that is rich with cultural and historical symbolism. Depicting the intricacies in the forms and shapes of human hair in a meticulous manner becomes an act of meditation for me. To depict the complex textures of human hair requires an open but yet focused mindset for the drawing to emerge naturally on the paper while maintaining gentle, tranquil, and minimalistic qualities. I intentionally adopted the subject matter and media to slow down my creative process and to counteract my perception of the contemporary world where things demand high speed, instantaneous gratification, which often results in endless chaos. 

At DRAWinternational, I intend to carry on with my research on the themes of memory, time, and identity. I am particularly interested in non traditional mark-making processes, but I do not have a specific project to be accomplished. I will rather use the opportunity to fully immerse myself in an investigation yet to be defined.


Marcelo Albagli

Mental health issues become more and more prevalent in modern society. Pace of life, the world around us with all its political, economic, environmental, sociological problems contribute to a high level of anxiety and depression.

What does it mean to be lonely? 

Can one be absolutely alone without any physical contact with other people and not be lonely? 

Loneliness is an emotional state that every person will face at a certain stage of his/her life. Sounds strange - in the age of social media, mass communication and the availability of constant interaction – loneliness, like an invisible but heavy creature, crawls into our lives and establishes a permanent residence. I want to research and explore this phenomenon and express it through the composition of lines and shapes.

I want to explore the intimacy of small scale, its limitations, difficulties, and intriguing nature. Small work requires not only undivided attention to details, but it also forces the artist to think about the importance of each element, each detail. I want to introduce multiple layers of information that reveal themselves gradually either as a part of sculpture or part of a drawn or painted narrative. I want to intensify the viewers’ experience through the reduction of scale and specificity of information and bring them to my level of involvement with the work. Certain things can only be said in a low voice, in a whisper, or seen by being held in one’s hands and brought up close to one’s eyes. 

Julia Feld.

Drawing is at the core of my work, exploring mark making for over two decades. Currently I am interested in finding ways to make marks which are void of the ego. Marks that are made for the pure pleasure of experiencing the process of making marks, as well as connecting to the aesthetic qualities a mark conveys.

Most of my drawings have been representational with abstract elements. I would like to use this residency to push my work into non-representational mark making. To stimulate this move from representational to non-representational I have been making drawing tools from discarded material. I intend to make new tools on this residency and draw with them to support research into studying the marks they make, rather than using them to draw in a representational way. Investigating the support for these marks is something else I would like to explore on this residency. For example, what will be the best surface to make marks on, paper, the body, the ground, with sound and so on.

I work with rejected material because of my longing to restore and rescue. Collecting and gathering discarded material helps me understand and connect with an area. On this occasion, it will help reduce the amount of art supplies I travel with. This plan will assist me as a starting point for this residency. I am open to and welcome inspiration and creative exchange that is likely to developed working in a new community and location.

Drawing is poetic. I attach importance to lyrical expression, I try to capture a spiritual and lyrical atmosphere in my drawings. Because true freedom is in our mind.

I believe that the residency program will open my horizons. I care about the knowledge I will gain and I think that engaging in dialogue with international artists will be beneficial for the painting studio courses that I will give at my university. 

The works I will produce will of course touch upon the problems of the society and the world in which I live now (freedom of the press, freedom of thought, human rights, secularism, etc.). I will process these problems in a lyrical way in my own drawing style. 

I believe the uncertainty of art will lead us to the illusion that anything can be art, yet at the same time, art is a tool to enlighten society. Thus, it must have a philosophical content.

Görkem Utku ALPARSLAN

Increasingly, I have been turning to drawing as a means of processing experience and locale. I created 80 drawings that ranged from sketches of things I saw in the world, to abstract works that somehow indirectly absorbed the feelings and conditions of person and place.

These drawings are not meant to exist as autonomous ‘art’ objects but as a looser whole, more like imprints, pages, notes, or a restless calendar accounting for days spent wandering, thinking, and feeling. My work, in this way, is inter-disciplinary and integral to my writing process. 

I would like to give myself time to draw and to experiment more fully with drawing.

Debra Brehmer

This process alludes to our collective trauma, self-inflicted by the societies of which we are members, and as is inflicted on our planet. The process has three distinct components. There is first the construction/creation, followed by deconstruction/decimation, and finally reconstruction/reintegration. A record will forever remain embedded in the object, thereby preserving the act of its creation. I like to consider these explorations as a visual journal of discoveries, as a diary of sorts. My work is informed by the patterns and elements of nature. More than by its state of being in any given moment, I am inspired by how something moves and by its potential to transform, regenerate or be acted upon. In addition to flowers and branches, I want to be more attentive to subtle atmospheric shifts, wind patterns and water currents. I am fascinated by archeology, excavation, fossils, symbols and ancient texts. All of these mysteries will somehow find their way into my initial drawings, so as I create something new, I will reference what has gone before. 

What has interested me over the last eighteen months or so, are the shapes that are formed by intersecting gestural lines. Spontaneity and gesture with deliberation and consideration, are the two areas of process that are very important to my artistic expression. 

One of the suggested areas of pursuit mentioned in your email was “drawing as philosophical thought”. That is appealing to me. But I might modify that a bit to incorporate emotional or even spiritual struggle. I am fascinated by the clash of opposing forces in ourselves, in the world around us and how they might be expressed in art. It’s a vast range that includes: light/dark, line/shape, emptiness/fullness, noise/quiet, peace/unrest, precision/imprecision - concepts that might describe the craft of drawing or equally, forces of the universe.

Above all, I’m interested in evoking and provoking emotion. And I would venture to say emotion and thought overlap. I feel emotion is the more authentic, but without thought, it remains wild and untamed. 

Jim Collins

The first drawing series uses touchable line drawings and the second is a series of drawings about inherent size of drops and hand palms. 

Line Tape drawing

25 drops and standards

25 drops were placed on the creased paper of each size from A0 to A5. Paper of different sizes is folded in the same pattern, and the same colour is placed at the same position on the grid made of creases. Each drop is made by drawing with a needle in the time it takes to dry after falling on the paper. 

Stacked 7_Space of hands 

This object is made by stacking 2 combinations of 7 units vertically. Each unit is made of a material that fits in my hands palms. 

These drawing practices encourage you to think about both the visual and the tactile, a feedback loop of thinking, making and recognising shape, size of image, the fundamental elements of modelling etc.

I would also like to research places related to my activities and interests. 

For example:

Art pariétal (cave painting)

Clinique de La Borde - a model in the field of institutional psychotherapy where patients actively participate in running the facility. 

Art Brut (outsider art)

Louis Braille educator and inventor of a system of reading and writing for use by the blind or visually impaired and the development of tactile graphics.

I would like to share my drawing practice with the local and wider community.

Koji MAEKAWA

In 2020, my main topic of interest was abstract artists' signature icon alphabets. I looked at the works of Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquait, Laura Owens, Giorgio Griffa and Kasimir Malevich. To a lesser extent, Kandinsky, Matisse, Joan Mitchel, Agnes Martin, Hilma af Klint and Georgia O'Keeffe. This work resulted in a painting show at Tapir Kunstraum in Berlin, centred on the transition from writing and encoding to painting. 

Looking at these author's icon sets, it occurred to me that, despite being uniquely idiosyncratic, there was a common element to them all. A universal set of icons, if you will. This made me think of an "author's hand" in its opposite — the universals. From that, my interest shifted to pattern recognition in painting—the meaning of each optical element—the position, the colour, material, size, etc. 

I am curious about the emergence of "universal" abstract imagery in "spontaneous" or "natural" movement. I want to explore the gradual transition between the gestural and the iconic: encoding and improvisation. How far does the "artist's hand" extend into the tools and the setup. The ergonomic peculiarities of a human hand, the drawing implements, the surface? 

Wouldn't individual hand movement due to ergonomic build be a "natural phenomenon"? Furthermore, are visual brain capacity, motor and language ability "natural phenomena" too? They are unique to each individual, of course. But are they unrepeatable? How much authorship does an author exude? 

There is evidence that children's early tadpole drawings are identical across cultures. So are the cave drawings of prehistoric humans all over the globe. These facts may highlight the universal something that drives these drawings' creation. Could it be that there is a universal drawing language that all humans share(d)? 

I want to continue exploring the agency and who's doing the encoding and leads the associations. If the author is not always responsible for the encoded meaning — what else contributes to it: the author's hand? The painting tradition? The collective subconsciousness? 

I will experiment with drawings by inhuman agents, such as trees or inanimate objects. Is there a way to draw as a "nonhuman"? I.e. without exerting my hand as in usual writing, letting the ergonomics of my arm and shoulder muscles and bones play out, whichever way it may. This process would create drawings that are mine and not mine at the same time. They would question who is it, that's drawing these. 

Maria Kubysh

Drawing for me has always existed as an experimental practice and one I have constantly returned to over the last decade. Forced to approach it obliquely because I am not naturally inclined towards rendering, I’ve developed a practice which is almost sculptural. Beginning with drawings of heavy graphite I lay down a solid field of many layers. I use a needle to etch a line, erasers and sand paper to remove material and a chamois to polish and refine the surface. Since 2011 I have been exploring images culled from the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, an archived collection of mostly Greek painted ceramics from antiquity. Founded on Oxford University's Beazley Archive, this online collection has provided me with source material for a number of drawings, objects and prints. Searching the archive with particular keywords gives rise to images of ancient Greek same sex sociality and relationships. For me, these images are cypher and metaphor. They speak to my own coming out (in a young queer’s obsession with greek imagery) and the idiom "going Greek"; but also to a sexual/ political coming out with my first reading of Foucault's History of Sexuality. Research in the archive continues to be an inspiration and the work has evolved to become more abstracted and coded. Materially I am interested in the quality the heavy graphite gives to the "drawn" object, how the etched line both appears and disappears with the reflecting light and operates as another code for queerness. The haptic quality of the surface alongside the elusive nature of the image combine to give the work a unique characteristic. The surface of these drawings is largely indelible. Once a mark is made it is impossible to delete. As a result my process with this technique has become very deliberate, often relying on mechanical and computational means. 

My aim at DRAWinternational is to expand my capacities for mark-making on this surface, to experiment with the limits of the surface itself and to create new and novel methods of interrupting it with the goal of evolving the drawings to their next iteration in a new body of work. The following questions will lead my investigations. What tools can I create to abrade, emboss or imprint the surface of the drawing in lieu of simply scratching it? In what ways can I experiment with the creation of the surface itself using the full variety of graphite products available? What materials will successfully combine with the graphite to allow for a variety of outcomes, color, or surface variation? How can I loosen up with the kind of marks I am making while still investigating a subject matter through abstracted representation? 

www.jaimecknight.com

Speed. The dance and the silence

Turn off controller thinking.

Unfortunately, because I didn't always have to express my creativity only in art, I couldn't do it straight away.

So I always drew when I could.

What do I want with you?

Time space and people who have dedicated themselves to the sign as an original expression.

I want to be as little targeted as possible.

I am interested in not wanting, connecting, by giving up fixed pattern technology,

Or beliefs and identities.

Yes, it is not entirely without an object ..

Man is one of the issues.

I drew nudes for many years, now the figures that are in me come to me of their own accord.

To give myself the space and time to let something arise, that's what I'm looking for.

And I'm happy to share this with serious people.

Andreas Melzer

A desire to create drawings from hidden rooms within and a desire that these drawings may have something to say to other people.

It sounds, scrapes, messes when I’m drawing. The charcoal meets the paper with a shuffling sound, the graphite crayon squeaks. I like these sounds and I like to wrestle with materials that gives blackness. Blackness tells me about stillness and focus. 

With the same piece of charcoal or crayon I can find myself talking with something very light and fragile, something which almost has no voice. Talking, drawing, listening, drawing. In this way, series of drawings appear. 

I’m always looking forward to these talks!

On one hand, I would like to find out if it’s possible for me to find the way to my “drawing room” – my intuitive way of drawing – in a new and “unknown” environment.

In what way would new conditions influence my art work?

On the other hand, I want to take steps out of this way of working. Not to leave it behind, but to regularly spend time to focus on “looking out”, observe the external surroundings with a crayon in my hand.

When I worked with my series of drawings named “Growing”, I never made sketches from roots, trunks, buds or tree crowns. The drawings grew out of my inner sense of “growing”. I have an idea to go on with the “growing” series, now with drawings made from sketches of “real” trees and plants, roots, bark, leaves, buds, fruits, seeds….

May be use them for diptychs, let them meet drawings made from “inside”, “from inside”/ ”looking out”. 

Or drawings with layers of different views – “from inside”/ ”looking out”.

A residence stay could give me both the structure for a project like this and also unexpected impulses to my way of thinking about a drawing project!

Rigmor Dahlqvist

www.rigmordahlqvist.com

My work explores the socio-political 'grey' areas through a psychological lens. Through adopting diverse drawing and painting techniques in the making of my work, I disrupt and alter the imagery taken from secondary sources, drawing attention to subjects of memory, perception, cruelty and free will. 

In my recent practice, I use the content found online, specifically on YouTube, to delve more deeply into questions of perception and the role technology plays in shaping our understanding of the world and choices we make. 

My interest in perception and memory, and our relationship and understanding of the content online - especially popular online platforms such as YouTube and Twitter informed my latest work. 

My starting point for the residency is one of my recent drawing series titled 'YouTube'. The drawings morphed into 'doodles', while my attention was occupied by explicit YouTube videos of the poultry industry. Bringing a flow to the paper, the unconscious and the illogical connected myself and my doodles to the moving image of the horrific content presented. 

'Seeing things that are not there is the result of top-down processes in the brain. Conscious perception is largely based on these top-down processes: your brain continuously compares the information that comes in through your eyes with what it expects on the basis of what you know about the world. The final result of this comparison process is what we eventually experience as reality. Our research results suggest that the brain builds up expectations not just on the basis of experience but on your mood as well.' 

A new study by researcher Jacob Jolij and student Maaike Meurs of the Psychology Department of the University of Groningen made me interested in exploring the manipulation of the senses in the creating process and its influence on the perception of the content found online, specifically YouTube. 

During six weeks of residency at DRAWinternational, I am planning to undertake a practice based research. Through the notion of 'doodling' and under the influence of meditation, as well as additional manipulation of the sense of hearing and possibly smell, I will carry out the experiments in response to one chosen YouTube video. 

I have chosen to work from YouTube video titled 'Asian Dog Meat Report [Documentary Film]', due to the polarity of emotions this video released in me. Upsetting lack of humanity as well as understanding the cultural differences, made me see the video as potentially opening contrary avenues of thinking and feeling about the subject matter.

www.ilonaskladzien.com 

My residency at DRAWinternational would enable me to begin a series of large charcoal and graphite drawings on paper.  This series will be centred on issues of place finding, retrieving and recalling moments of clarity, peace, and calm and coming to terms with what one thought their life would be, what it actually turns out to be and all the spaces in between.

www.patriciacarriganartist.com

The imagery I have worked on the past eight years has mostly been representational, with a concentration on two unconnected subjects: clothing and divers. Clothing has always intrigued me as objects that are expressive of its wearer, a reflection of a life lived, chosen, cast aside. But clothing, when worn, is different to one found hanging on the back of a seat or hanging from a hook, disembodied and lifeless. My practice wrestles with the latter, working on absences found between folds, with wrinkles as details found on the skin of my subjects.

I have also been fascinated by the image of a platform diver in free fall. The falling body, the velocity of its drop, set against an empty background, bestows a purity to the single action. My drawings catch the diver’s falling body suspended in mid-fall, tracing the line and arc of his descent. 

My current work does not allow me much time to do creative work, and I am hoping to make the most of the residency with DRAWinternational to continue and further my practice. I am hoping that the time and space will allow me to renew my energy to explore new ideas and new imagery, further exploring the capacity of drawing and its many trajectories.

During my residency at DRAWinternational I aim to make work that expresses ‘transformation of the individual’ as they pass across a border/threshold. 

When ‘We are all born foreigners’, how we transform to become natives to ourselves becomes a crucial element in being human. 

As an individual enters into another territory their migration lets them look back at their origin from a distance.

It lets a person explore their very nature from a place of transition and transformation.

I will explore drawing and the body as it transitions over time. I will explore the body as it crosses over a border, psychological, politically and physically. 

I will express the migrant as a person of change, a person who has found themselves through their own movement across space and time. 

I will show this changing state in the physical works of art I produce.

Ritchie Rhombus

On January 18, 1974, when my father was expelled from the country, we took a flight from Santiago de Chile to Germany. As a carry-on bag, my mother gave me a small plastic suitcase to keep what I wanted to take with me. I filled it with what at two and a half years was my most important property: the paper figures I collected. 

At the airport we were escorted by armed soldiers to the plane and the indication was to board quickly. When climbing the stairs, I do not know if by a gust of wind or because I dropped it, the suitcase opened and the figurines flew out. I thought I had done something very bad because if we did not get up fast the military could get angry, but I did not care if the military got angry, it mattered more that my parents got angry with me. When I turned around, my parents and my brother were going down the stairs and began to retrieve all the figures they could and stored in the suitcase. I kept these figures for many years in all the displacements that came for the next 17 years with Refugee status granted by UNHCR. My father maintained the prohibition of entering the country until in 1988 the end of the exile in my country was decreed and since then I keep coming and going, looking for my place in the world. 

As an artist I have also traveled through different disciplines: visual arts, graphic design and book illustration. I feel that in all of them I do the same thing: expose these stories and gather paper figures. In a natural way, my work has come together in ways to make visible the stories of those who continue moving around the world today. 

I gather and confront those worlds: that of the exiles and those who receive, those who recover and cling to their treasures to continue living and those who can not. Looking to the fragility of the dispossession and the tenderness of those who try to recover the pieces of paper or, simply, extend a hand to receive. 

I seek to push the medium of drawing beyond its typical boundaries, within the drawing surface itself and in relation to other media. Thematically, this relates to my ongoing interests in issues of borderlines, displacement, origin and memory. 

I have long been drawn to the questions of how our personal and cultural identities are challenged when leaving a place of origin, crossing a border into an unknown territory; a displacement that occurs in a geographical as well as a psychological sense. 

My exploration in drawing is like the crossing of borders. Going from one space into another, crossing from one limit to another, and in the process transforming the sense of self into an unexpected hybrid. In the art piece there is an alteration that leads to an undefined form/meaning with the intent of shifting our way of viewing. I want to suggest in this process a sense of the “otherness”; of seeing beyond our preconceived notions of what should be. 

In my drawings there are both classical elements, while in the surrounding space there are loose, gestural abstract marks throughout. A duality of forces and multiple borders emerge from the tension and transfiguration of the surface. Pieces of paper are collaged or sewn onto the surface leaving rough edges or open spaces where the paper has been torn. Areas of the paper are slashed, punctured, torn, sewn, and yanked from its flat surface. String dangles on the surface as floating lines in space, and forms emerge that jut out into space away from the two-dimensional boundary. It is a breaking away 

The metaphorical and physical use of borderlines and the interstices that result from the different image-making processes, produce a drawing occupying space as an object as well as a moving image and as an installation project.

I am interested in further developing these three areas: drawing, space and the kinetic. 

Antonia Guerrero

I often make my own materials by binding pigments with egg tempera or other oils, working on board, canvas or paper. This process of grinding pigments and layering the colour has helped develop an acute sensitivity to colour and light, as well as to the material properties of different pigments and surfaces.

I will use the experience at DRAWinternational to develop a series of drawings, combining these techniques to make complex but delicately layered pieces. These will draw on my interest in sinopia, the underdrawings of frescoes discovered when the uppermost layer is removed in restoration. I am drawn to their poetic relationship with the layering and the underbelly of time, and through the residency I will interrogate both the conceptual and material possibilities of this notion.

My time at the residency will enable me to continue an exploration of figurative work that shifts between historical and contemporary references, with a focus on contemporary re-engagements with the mural.


Grace Crabtree

Lifeboats adrift smiling

Dad steps from the skit

Silt and gulls diving

I recently visited the once remote island of Sherkin my grandmother Margaret Barry was brought up on, during the C19 thousands had left escaping famine and penury leaving a population of less than 100, a migration that for different reasons is ongoing.  I sat in Island House built by my great grandfather and listened to J2zz with my second cousin Sean O’Neil, smoking rollies while Tony Allen kicked it out on the radio. I have visited the island many times as a child, an itinerant young squatter and now of age reflecting on life. There are photos of my parents honeymoon on Sherkin where they look happy, very much in love; but the light faded, home became a battleground, shouts and absences mutually exclusive. This immersion in being Irish yet brought up in Stockport, Manchester is a common story: a feeling of not belonging, being perceived as Irish here, as British in West Cork.

A blind eye or acting on impulse

We all have our stories of belonging, or not and stories where a chance encounter with a stranger prevents a slight mishap, potential calamity or even loss of citizenship. I am interested human stories and wish to collect the stories you write: the taxi driver who returns your phone, a jump start in the pouring rain; small acts of human kindness which cost nothing but prevents your perfect evening being spoiled, temporarily reminding you to do the same to others. But these acts are on a continuum. For many, one pay check away from the streets, living illegally or fleeing violence an opportunity, a blind eye, a lend, these altruistic acts between individuals, communities, between strangers and even officials can prevent a thread of tough reality snapping. They can be a measure of what it is to be a human, sometimes done at personal danger, despite our better judgement and are a rejection of social norms, data drive profiling, stereotyping and fake news revealing our shared vulnerability and humanity.

Subjugated and obedient

Travel now is sold as been imperceptibly easy, we are all people of the world, an exchange of documents, taken for granted this can lead to complacency.  A friend of mine got stopped at gunpoint yesterday(Monday) travelling out of Catalonia, her life passed in front of her eyes but was allowed to travel because she had the right papers. Lots of journeys/ migrations have universal themes where once we were bounded by the physical landscape we now pass man made borders and checkpoints which are stressful luminal spaces that make one feel we are no longer individuals with hard fought citizen rights. We must submit to a dehumanising process established to ensure our safety, but in fact often feels to be polarising, profiling types and behaviours. The Windrush generation, Shamima Begum, Brexit, peace walls, demilitarised zones are all about moded forms of citizenship; a border can be an inconvenience to the tourist, an open wound to the patriot, an opportunity to the smuggler or a death trap to the refugee. All these things build physical and metaphorical spaces between people, in contrast to the chance altruism described above.  

My research intends to investigate the theme of these liminal metaphysical landscapes defined by chasms, rips, power imbalance and imagined space between individuals which are non pictorial but suggest naturalistic barriers: mountains, walls, rivers and how forms fragment and butt up against each other. The texts are process driven through often repetitive mark making, frottage, print, collage and also entail chance discoveries and acts of risk taking and altruism. 

The residency is an opportunity to refine my thinking and work in collaboration with other artists....my work exists in the form of incomplete written texts, small sketches/ideas, collage/prints and large drawings/collages which need fully contextualising and bringing into the light.

John Barry

While every work is framed within its own emotional, intellectual and conceptual framework, they are all investigations into the complexities of humanity and the questions around representation : how does one negotiate the space between transience and stillness? How can a line be a scaffolding of personal experiences and yet reflect world occurrences? How can drawing become a space for quiet isolation yet a silent protest against disconnection and partition? 

Meghana Bisineer 

I am a fine artist, illustrator, and multi-instrumentalist composer. I focus on the creation of large- scale, highly detailed subjects of sound and movement. I compose sound for image and image for sound.

My art making practice is a generative and re-generative process of experimentation, learning and building on a select number of subjects and media about which I am passionate. The drawing process is a sequence of problem-solving steps, where I construct and de-construct my ideas, imagery and materials directly on paper--with resolution being the accumulation of multiple iterations distilled into some sort of recognised truth. 

With dark layers of charcoal, ink or watercolours, frenetic marks and bits of colour, I begin with images of familiar places--my backyard, local parks and woods, for backdrops, focusing particularly on the drama and mystery of the night. Through numerous starts and revisions, I establish and arrange the mise-en-scene and populate it with characters. The protagonists are oftentimes women and adolescents, whose images I derive from childhood memories, composites of family photos and random scenes of actors from vintage, noir and sci-fi films photographed off my TV screen. They are frozen in ambiguous gestures, self-absorbed, opaque and melancholy, seemingly unaware of dangers lurking in night time woods. These scenes are my attempt to pull the past forward and morph it into an in-between place - real and yet dreamlike, futuristic and retrograde, lived and fabricated - where the utopian promise of suburbia and America have now gone to seed to become a creepy, unforgiving and overgrown wilderness. The women and children are left to fend for themselves. 

Drawing Research Residency 'THE INVISIBLE REALM OF POSSIBILITY'

The project will focus upon notions of intention and the physical act of drawing as it arrives as a vectorial force on a material surface. One could say, an infrastructure from where other possibilities collide, from common habitual behaviours toward the realm of the unknown. 

This residency programme is in partnership with l’AiR ARTS and FIAP, PARIS

Drawing is the core of my work. Instead of pre-thought drawings that lead to controlled final results I create starting points and principles. I set up interactive situations and provide frameworks in which there is room for diversity and where I encourage non-verbal encounters between people with different cultural and social backgrounds.. Traces and memories gradually emerge as reflections of the act. 

At DRAWinternational I would like to deepen my research of the social dialogue of drawing, communicate with the citizens through immersive nonverbal actions of drawing. I create concepts, drawings, workshops and performances for intercultural dialogue and interaction with the audience.

I would like to expand and evolve my drawing and performance-based research practices and create new work and methodologies to create a social dialogue through drawing. 

Liesje van den Berk

www.liesjeberk.nl

Drawing Research Residency 'THE INVISIBLE REALM OF POSSIBILITY'

The project will focus upon notions of intention and the physical act of drawing as it arrives as a vectorial force on a material surface. One could say, an infrastructure from where other possibilities collide, from common habitual behaviours toward the realm of the unknown. 

For a moment I was seized by the dazzling of this image. Which immediately retracted to the surface from which it had appeared. Leaving only a poorly drawn silhouette - like a footprint having come out of the bath. 

This, outburst filled the whole space with a strange sensation. It was a daydream that my activity erased- unable to recover the accuracy of the evocation in the contours of the forms.

Our lives are filled with these small outbursts; these false alerts. And the gushing falls away like a dream that could not be born ... 

But sometimes the gushing becomes persistent not to say real. Like the rise of George Didi-Huberman's Phasme ... What was hidden from our eyes is suddenly revealed and overwhelms us. Upsetting the scenery that the second before we had taken for granted. 

The artistic image or the image in general does not escape this. This persistent reverie intrudes into our reality and grabs us. And makes of this chaos that surrounds us and fills us, a singular meeting place. 

From then on, our experience is increased by this new encounter. Especially since this intimacy resists our analysis for a time. The aim being to stretch to a maximum this moment. 

Since once over, this thing will be named and arranged in our personal history. 

And once named, it will lose the dazzle from which we had learnt so much. 

Because before it was still connected to infinite possibilities, and behind this form could be perceived an infinity of others. 

That's what I look for - this infinity of possibilities. Thereby, I would have both lost and found myself in these distant entrenched forms. 

My mind contemplating a world with new eyes, an infinite and open space, finally stripped of the barriers that withdrew it. "


Terence Wennink

The project will focus upon notions of intention and the physical act of drawing as it arrives as a vectorial force on a material surface. One could say, an infrastructure from where other possibilities collide, from common habitual behaviours toward the realm of the unknown. 

This residency programme is in partnership with l’AiR ARTS and FIAP, PARIS

ALKA DASS (South Africa)

I like keeping my creative process organic. My material for creation is not usually one specific medium. It varies based on what moves me at the time and what best articulates what I intend to say. The physicality of the work and the language it speaks is of utter importance to me. There has to be that clear relationship between the two. 

This residency would help me be exposed to learning new techniques that I have not revealed before. My main focus would be also taking these new experiences and creating a cohesive body of work that has the ability to translate my concept into my artworks flawlessly.

I definitely feel I am most inspired when I find new inspiration as well as Interacting with local artists. Learning from them. learning and understanding the culture and the people of that area. The program fits that description perfectly. 

www.alkadass.com

The project will focus upon notions of intention and the physical act of drawing as it arrives as a vectorial force on a material surface. One could say, an infrastructure from where other possibilities collide, from common habitual behaviours toward the realm of the unknown. 

This residency programme is in partnership with l’AiR ARTS and FIAP, PARIS

Kate Arthur ( South Africa)

This year I have been focusing on drawing particularly, experimenting with its parameters and extending my personal repertoire in mark-making. I would love to have this dedicated space and opportunity to push my creative practice in new directions, looking at and experimenting with my subjects in new ways. I want to push production and experimentation in the studio as far as I can.

The program sounds challenging and stimulating and I would be open to the feedback and insights provided by the various other artists and curators I would encounter. 

I have been developing an ongoing series of what I call “Body Portraits”, which look at the body as a site of identity – in particular, the bodies of people who identify as queer. Portraiture involves a process of looking that allows me to focus on the physical details of a person’s face and body and to consider how those details might bring to light aspects of who they are and what they have have experienced.  Acknowledging the body as a site of identity is particularly pertinent to queer people, whose bodies are often sites of ridicule, shame and persecution.  I am interested in the questions and conversations that these body portraits might open up about the narratives of both individual and collective identity. The term ‘queer’ encompasses elements of sexuality and gender, but also holds a politics that acknowledges intersectional overlaps. In this work I consciously embrace and employ LGBTQ politics with the hope of presenting a challenge to normative understandings of gender, sex and sexuality. I intend to keep building on this series of portraits as a means of honouring, celebrating and making visible these bodies and individuals to whom they belong.

www.katearthur.com

I always have had an effortless facility for drawing and—from that long engagement—come to understand that my practice is driven by the 'fact' or 'mystery' of drawing—as an embodied exercise of perception, as revelation of imagination—rather than by interest in cultivating some identity as 'artist'. From such understanding emerged a hybrid practice-as-research approach, where drawing is framed as an account of vision—divulged from purposeful digression away from expectations of sight, filtered through imagination, and composed from subtle traces of perceptual input. Drawing thus fixes and reveals transient qualities of perception, over and above any nominal subject-matter immediately apparent on its surface. For me, a drawing's success lay not in its faithful reproduction of external reality, but instead with how well it chronicles an individual perceptual journey.  Even when seemingly a product of direct observation, a drawing stands as a translation of the interiority of imagination into manifest, externalised record.

My practice-led PhD, "Out of the Corner of the Eye/the 'I': Drawing as Disposition of Perception" evaluated drawing as adaptation of perception, situating drawing as distinct mode of cognition.  Here knowledge is disclosed through image alone, as a cognition of a different calibre than language-based ideation.  After my PhD, I continued to follow the threads of that scholarly project through writing, teaching, and other forms of research activity— but now arrive at a juncture where the language of the academic constrains the curiosity of making, the wonder of drawing, my access to vivid discovery that arises only from immersion within the processes of practice. 

There is a lingering query that arose from research, which has to do with considering how and why (western) traditions of drawing—as acquired expressive skill—coalesce around a specific set of rules for looking; i.e., contour, negative/positive, perspective, and so on.  These conventions instruct us to reposition our application/reception of vision, and such repositioning allows for some ‘honest’ representation to be discerned and transcribed. Yet these sensory reconfigurations also afford an expanded embrace of what can be deemed 'observable'. It seems likely that the transcriptional traditions for drawing evolved from perceptual promptings that appear along other subtle pathways within vision — from when someone took note of altering moments of looking that deviated from our habitual projects/expectations of observation. As there is always more available to possible perception than can be derived from each instance of sight, then might there be additional and/or alternative 'rules' to be discerned through/for drawing practice? It is this notion, these expanded and variable sensibilities/sensory data, that I wish to interrogate. What additional aspects and avenues of perception might become discerned/revealed within both the process and the enduring artefact of drawing?  If one breaks open the 'conventions' of drawing—what else may emerge into 'the visible'?

hatch-drawing.org

Drawing has always played an key role in my creative process. Initially I develop ideas on paper through a series of sketches and drawings. I allow texture, layer making, expressive and gestural marks to play an integral role. Printmaking as a medium has also taught me to embrace chance elements that occur during the process. The importance of drawing and mark making have therefore become increasingly important as my practice has evolved. I welcome the prospect of exploring further drawing methodologies during my DRAWinternational residency. 

Having travelled extensively over the last two years with a matured mind set- this enquiry has continued as I have become more politically, socially and environmentally aware. Asia became my main source of inspiration, I was fascinated by it’s historical, mythological and spiritual past and in particular after visiting temples and ruins in both Nepal and Cambodia. Research lead me to the Romanticism movement in the context of ancient monuments as the only human achievement that could transcend the destructive process of time. These crumbling architectural structures lost to the jungle and comparable to turbulent times we live in or serving as a metaphor for the global issues that preoccupy and concern me. A two month period in Berlin during the summer lead to further research about the ultra Romanticism movement that has emerged in Germany in recent years - this is the project I wish to pursue during my stay.

My main objective is to develop a more academic approach to my practice. I feel I will benefit enormously from academic support and regular discussion of work at the centre.  My intention is to produce a body of work which I can possibly exhibit but more importantly advance on a more academic trajectory in both my research approach and in the execution of new work.

But lately, I have felt a tug…no a pounding rush of something louder, stronger, angrier. Quiet reflection and subtle nuance are giving way to shouting, screaming expressive lines followed by punched in blackest of black charcoal. The rough scrapping sounds, the powdery dust and smell of burnt wood – it’s intoxicating – makes me drunk, awake, a seer of visions, a prophet, an instigator….the other side of my own quiet coin. I’m becoming my own dark twin.

Where I’ve always used charcoal in my work, lovingly formed with my own hands by burning pieces and parts of the trees I meet….I’ve now been thinking of charcoal as burned, raging fires that engulf, destroy and char. Maybe to match the wildfires that ravage the land around me here in Oregon, maybe to match the political unrest and tension that surround my digital world.

My drawings include more figurative suggestions; both beast and man. They are forced together into a new being, rougher, unhappy with itself as its never truly of nature or man any longer. Werewolves of all shapes and ancestries. 

Firstly, creating gestural drawn interpretations of existing three-dimensional imaged garment forms to further my understanding of the relationship between image and object and the drawn intersection between them. 

Secondly making drawn transcriptions of bodily gestures from video works that have been created, thereby creating gestural topographic drawings of the digital trace.

I feel that both of these approaches would open up and answer key elements within not only my creative practice but also how the role of the drawn gesture can be explained within the practice based PhD I am undertaking.

Image/object 

Within the work I have made so far I am currently understanding the garments that have been created as a form that transitions from drawn image on a two dimensional surface to three dimensional imaged sculptural form.

I would like to explore this change from two to three dimensions further by creating gestural drawn interpretations of these three dimensional forms, where they sit as sculptural objects within the plane of the paper surface, created through addition and erasure of gestural mark and line. 

The aim would be for these drawn interpretations of sculptural forms not to be defined but open and fluid where the image sitting on the surface defines surface and shape and embodies action and energy in their form of making.

Gestural mapping

I have created various films that have explored the way in which the image interacts with the body and is interpreted as a form of drawing. 

The body be it static where the image is projected onto it or in movement enacting a choreographed performance is understood as drawing across and on the surface of the screen and within the depth of the studio space. 

I would like to develop this further by creating a series of drawn works on paper, which are investigating a visual mapping of the body’s movement that traverses across the screen and its intersected spaces, and as such creates a topographic drawn visualisation of body, image and movement.

Armando Chant

Drawing, a continuous process to me:

In my 25 years of artistic practice, DRAWING has persistently played the most innate role obviously carving out my vocabulary.

Starting from charcoal, conté, ink, rice paper, and oil bars to paint. I have currently moved to a broader perspective in drawing.

My recent innovation is works in fibre and fabric with thread, wool and conté to create large scale works; <i am creating these collages by means of drawing as a language with the application of embroidery, cut outs of fabric and charcoal lines. The continuous coexisting practices of drawing and painting demanded an amalgamation into a single surgical treatment. I don't need to practice them separately anymore.

My work is broadly earthy texturally rich and rough deliberately ignoring the elements of discipline and uniformity. This fascination of raw and nude expression compels a hallucinatory rendering of imagination.

My works are gradually evolving into the concept of CITY which in a broader connotation contain the elements of all forms of life, habitats, innovations, destruction, consumption and construction. Cities are chambers of human action that design both our eco and social systems and engineer the structure of our existence.

Nidhi Argawal

My main method of work is drawing in ink, charcoal and graphite.  I have also done performative work based around the concept of drawing as method of coping with reality. My aims with the residency is to have time to develop my book project into more experimental territories. I am experimenting with the use of new mediums and looser drawing approaches to my work and have also started to incorporate my sketchbooks more prominently in my artistic practise. Often the process and planning sketches of works are just (or even more) interesting than finished artworks or illustrations. 

I have been working on an ongoing series of books called 'The Little Books of Mysteries. These zines are collections of my stories and pictures.  Since my work straddles the line between fine art and illustration, I have found that my drawings work very well in a printed, self published format.   

Two of the ‘Little Books of Mysteries’ consist mainly of scanned in version of my Moleskine drawings.  I have also recently been exploring the territories of folk art and 'outsider art' as an antidote to the over conceptualised and often cynical/fashionable element to much of contemporary art. 

Being in a new environment and culture will definitely be fecund ground for the growth of new ideas, stories and techniques in my work.  Also having the time to focus solely on my own stories and character designs for a month long period will certainly help me to make advances with my book. I would also definitely want to learn more about local folklore and myths and incorporate this into my art. Intellectually I am interested in storytelling and narrative traditions and how they are presented in visual languages across different cultures.  

My drawing practice merges photorealism with abstract sensibilities to explore the beauty and brevity of everyday life. My art practice rationale is to apply drawing to everyday subjects, symbols and still life objects that represent the full spectrum of life.  

I feel most alive when drawing. For me the repetitive, labour intensive and time-consuming method forces me to be still. I have recently completed a Master of Contemporary Art and Master of Fine Art at the University of Sydney, researching drawing as an embodies and meditative state of Being. This rigorous and immersive program turned my practice inside out, solidifying my commitment to my medium and dramatically evolving my subjectivity. This has become the platform for a whole new body of work using abstract/photo real aesthetics to engage a dialogue between materiality and symbolism.   

My practice currently centres on the still life. Of particular enamour is Vanitas painting—a visual commentary of motifs that capture the fragility and fullness of being alive. Of fascination to me is the performative level to which the message is inverted through the symbolism.  It is the contradiction of the vanitas that is the image’s exquisite semiotic structure, ensuring that that which is sacred is not merely pictured. Rather, the allure of the image delivers the sacred, by way of a dark or fallen world.  

For the DRAWinternational residency I propose a rigorous daily immersion into the function and agency of the everyday still life using my everyday experience of residency life for subjectivity. I have always used objects of symbolism throughout my practice, even in portraiture. For me, objects or motifs possess a stronger capacity to point to who and what we are.  I will look at different ways in which the medium of drawing within the still life can be utilised and innovated.

My ambition is to use an engaged cultural discourse to redeploy the still life in the present. This experience will give me the opportunity to develop the portfolio of artistic and conceptual skills I seek. 

Amy Dynan

I am interested in the status of perceptions during intuitive creation. When I studied at art school, I learnt many painting skills. However, I felt estranged from my works at the time. I could make works in an Expressionist style, but I did not have any particular kinds of emotions in my life, therefore there was a gap between me and the work.

In order to find lines which connect with me, I tried to avoid those skills and started to draw intuitively  with simple tools like ball-point pens and paper.

During this residency, I would like to further develop this unconscious way of drawing. Based on previous experience, I would like make landscape sketches of Caylus. I will go around the town, use body perceptions to feel the atmosphere and sketch it. The images I sketch will be not only figurative expressions, but also unconscious appearances. It will be a challenge for me exploring how to combine figurative expressions and unconscious appearances in harmony on paper.

FAN SIH-CI

www.sihcifan.com

I would engage in a series of rapid sketches in the environment, drawings endeavouring to capture the moment and atmosphere in sketch book form (which I regard as fundamental to the overall process of picture making), with a view of developing these studies further.

Currently I am working from elements of wallpaper design using water soluble pens, reproducing and distressing the image. This element of distortion from the original image has become something that includes an element of chance. Continuing to work in this manner during the residency would be something that I would like to pursue.

I feel this residency would give me a fantastic opportunity to work and develop ideas with fellow Artists and the local community, I anticipate there could be an exciting crossover and exchange of ideas.

Anticipating the creation of site specific pieces; I would like to achieve a body of work that represents a diary of my residency.

John Lord

I have particular interest in doing a residency in France because of its high consideration of environmental art. During my initial exploration a few years ago I started studying botany in Argentina -where I’m from- since I wanted to have more knowledge about how nature works and reproduces itself. This made me aware of some crucial processes in life reproduction and ecology that we often take for granted, and how deep is the damage that we are doing to our environment. That transmuted into the basis of my current works.

At this time, all my works are distributed and articulated between five central ideas and I often develop all of them at the same time.

Water gold, they come for the water

Radioactive vegetal cells

What’s in the air/interferences

Beekeeper

Milca Ronzoni

www.milcaronzoni.com.ar

My quest is to further explore these ideas with the welcomed support of other artists in residency and John and Grete McNorton.  

www.sarahelliottstudio.com

Over the course of the residency I will produce experimental works that engage with the construction of studio furniture and architectural spaces that facilitate and shape mimetic drawing processes.   These arrangements will aim to invite participatory and collaborative engagement and serve as the ground for the production of a body of drawing work. The studio furniture constructions and resulting drawings will engage the symmetry of the body, intermodal processes of observation and expression, and consider the materials and form of the furniture as objects of observation. 

I would like to use this time to create work that has no pre-defined outcome, making work which responds to the area and setting. I tend to make site specific work, and feel the relationship between the setting and object is very important

Agnes Jones

Because I myself, as an immigrant, have lived in the U.S. and UK for my university education, I am interested in the issue of identity; life and location that are determined by politics, society and the nurturing surroundings of our own countries. Creating a contradiction between who you are and who you are seen to be. 

Since my work has been on social issues, I took a specific direction focusing on migration. This research is both for creating works and also educating myself to fully understand their and my own standpoint and issues. This research is to create drawings/paintings, sound and video works on the subject, using images and recorded sound from interviews with the refugees.

During my residency at DRAWinternational I would like to focus on the production side of my practice, which is to create and visualise projects in drawing, painting and sculptural forms with interactive elements. 

I would like to experiment and create drawings of the refugees to see what form best suits the migration issue and the stories and backgrounds from the individual refugees. I hope to have the opportunity to meet refugees in the Tarn and Garonne, also.

In addition, I would also like to explore creating a jigsaw puzzle structure, each of which has prints of pictures of refugees who I have met and spoken to, and to assemble these to make a layered-maze-kind of sculpture with electronic elements such as sensors, push buttons, LEDs and motors as an interactive and kinetic project. The 2D drawing and sculpture both have their own autonomy but these are a narrative within the same subject matter. 

Working in the fields of site - specific live action, performative drawing, installation, video, I have been concentrating on drawing in two different, sometimes related capacities.

The first, as a way to interact with local contexts and surfaces - incising, scratching into, rubbing over.

Secondly, I connect to the mark-making activity- investigating the state of flux, transience through drawing /erasing activity. (In earlier works, I worked on paper, now I am chiefly working directly on walls) Charcoal and eraser are my primary tools to explore these states. 

I am interested in drawing as pure action, connecting body and mind, nature and culture, material and spirit.  

PERFORMANCE

Live Actions, site-specific projects

Connection to place and site using body, materials, drawing, marking.

Works include site-specific or gallery works, works performed live, or for camera only; action-based projects that incorporate installation, photography, video; short actions or durational work.

In recent works, I have been concentrating on drawing and book-based site work.

www.lezlirubinkunda.com

Drawing is a natural process in my work. I approach my work through making studies of collected and handmade objects through collage and the juxtaposition of the objects. These collages are then documented and become photographs.  I am interested in the exploration of the digital image and projection for the purposes of exhibition, documentation and installation art.

I moved to Paris, from Australia, in 2015, and have recently returned to the medium of ceramics to create ceramic artworks from porcelain paper clay and have discovered new ways of making objects that reflect my interest in the natural and constructed environment. The inherent qualities of porcelain are not dissimilar to paper, and I use this similarity to emboss, draw and paint on the clay surface.  As a collected body of work I am producing objects that become an installation  - a forest or city of forms, which are also stand alone objects, and have the potential for image projection.

From the above premise of my artwork, I am open to possibilities of development and the creation of new work.

Sally Cleary 

My own feelings of displacement and longing will be examined in relation to the surrounding environment. Places hold the marks of nature and of people who have come and gone. The symbols that sometimes appear in my work: nests, birds, industrial materials such as a chain link fence, decaying or rusted materials, and handwritten notes, are an indication of the history and mapping of the layers that exist simultaneously in our minds, and in the land we inhabit. 

I will look to this new environment, with a rich history of scars, both natural and human, to bring many images and symbols to the surface, and into the process of my drawing, painting, and mark making. 

My hope is to map the emotional, spiritual and physical aspects of the site with abstract and recognizable symbols. I would relish the opportunity to delve deeper into these ideas in a way that in not possible during my busy working and teaching life. 

Widely travelled, I have always been interested in nature and/or objects that embody and reverberate my experience of place. Recent forays have explored esoteric Buddhism from ancient Japan, resulting in large charcoal drawings of temple gongs, incense cauldrons and dragons. A current body of work of fine pencil drawings depicts a personal reflection of inheritance and responsibility through objects bequeathed to me from my mother. 

The misericords found in the churches of medieval England have been a source of fascination. I have seen photographs of the gargoyles of Caylus, some gazing down from the facades of old buildings, others embedded in the town's ramparts and an impressive display seated on plinths with their heads stretched upwards, as if howling to the moon. I could see these creatures inspiring a series of large gestural charcoal drawings as a starting point. I would like the opportunity to extend my drawing practice, experiment and challenge myself through a residency with Draw International within the surrounds of this 12th century village. 

Christina Harrison 

One of my major loves is to draw. I love to explore what I am thinking and reacting to by simply drawing. It is my way of processing the world around me - from this basis, other art works emerge.

My research methods in education have been ethnographic, which I have brought into research in art. 

I enjoy experiential teaching and so it is natural for me to want not only to do a wall and floor exhibition but to allow the work to then be experienced by the visitors so the full cycle of learning and expression has the potential to occur. 

I would like to research drawing more and explore new methods to enhance my practice.

Dr Karl Richardson 

My interest in Art is conceptual. I am interested in exploring areas such as mathematics, social justice, education and the environment.

I have a medical background and have been a clinician for many years, working with a wide diversity patients – as a family general practitioner, anaesthetist, intensivist, pain specialist, drug addiction, flying doctor – from inner city to rural towns to remote communities in Australia – as well as working overseas in England and the Netherlands – and as a medical officer in the Australian Army Medical Corps.

I like to really question what I read and observe – especially working across new boundaries. 

I have done much of the research for the past two touring exhibitions: Christina and I spend many hours discussing how to amalgamate the concepts.

I mainly work on the games section of the exhibition as it requires precision and accuracy, linking the art to scientific areas (eg  genetics, when models  of the DNA double helix provide a visual perception, enhanced by touching and discussion. 

Like Christina, I like to have visitors interact, question, learn and develop their own art.

The rediscovery of my late grandfather’s antique dipping pen in 2012 inspired me to get illustrating. 

Hi John

Thank you for taking your time to reply with such personalised, thoughtful attention to my email. You make a great point. I think the fact that I have freed all this time to create (for the first time) makes me want to jam it all in like a child at a Christmas buffet. 

I spent a week in Paris at the end of October and after visiting a spectrum of museums in search of "where do I begin". My answer, while looking at the Picasso / Giacometti exhibition was "drawing".

I have illustrated works commercially using ink and paper but haven't ever really explored the medium. Perhaps it would make more sense for me to come and explore drawing with a specific focus on drawing in ink. I have been using an ink brush and am so excited about the range it offers but haven't even scratched the surface. The idea of loose charcoal on un-precious paper also feels like a good place to start. 

Dear Tatjana, 

I think this deeper focus will prove useful and lead you to further ideas and processes. It does not prevent you using other media i.e. clay but to the service of the drawing and I can take you there with directed studies with a mind to 3D and 4D. 

Drawing tools can also be a direction, some which you may wish to make dealing with dryness and liquidity. I have a workshop where we can make drawing implements to suit the individual concepts.

PLANT AN IDEA  -  RESIDENCY 
Works that will contribute to the development of a community garden 'les jardis de paradis'
Drawing and design may feature as part of the work but so too can painting, sculpture, print, performance, installation, music and poetry as a site specific act.

My studio practice is currently divided between drawing and painting and study of plant and earth pigments as art mediums.

Art making has always been a way for me to make sense of the world. In many ways I drew as a way of being at home in myself, in ways that I was not allowed to while growing up. 

Dialog of any meaningful sort was not valued nor encouraged and my ability to articulate thoughts and feeling felt stilted and stifled. 

I suppose this series in the form of a half drawn half written journal/sketchbook is the reclamation of suppressed experiences and denied emotions of a kind that seek integration with a balanced (and mostly cheerful adult) self. 

This alchemical process of ‘Conjunctio’, Carl Jung’s joining together is taking shape and seeks the light of day; this is the story I hope to explore this winter at DRAWinternational.

I like the idea of allocating time for drawing, apart from painting apart from lecturing and away from my native habitat. I relish any opportunity to share ideas with other visiting artists and engage in dialog about the ideas being brought to the surface. 

Mind, memory and body are reference fields that float back and forth between my drawings some with accompanying text incorporated into the drawings, others just pictures. I start with small intimate portals, and seek to widen and deepen on a scale that moves from the preciousness of a diary entry to an expanse that feels risky, scary, vulnerable; one that the viewer can step into an inhabit in another way. 

Judi Pettite

How to negotiate a balance between an intellectual insight, spiritual practice and a deepening of craft and skill? How to make drawn lines a scaffolding of concepts and ideas? How to abandon the ambition to concretise and still embody spirit within a drawing? How to be isolated and achieve community, include a tentacle within one’s work that could potentially touch the viewer? What is the place of sentimentality and stubbornness of a traditional technique within the contemporary art discourse?

How much do I have to insist on my direction and how little do I let outer demands influence the way I work? Can choices in the way I make things signify something political? 

All of these questions I felt I didn’t have yet enough space to to respond to. But I always found that the solution to any doubt is work... I had so far experienced the exaltation of long work hours and suffocated the doubt with the passion of “having done right” in my drawing.

Surrounded by the gently curved line s of hills on the horizon, under the dot of sun, hands deep in dirt.
Where do the bells of the universe sound louder than in the gardens of a bucolic village in south western France?
What is thirty days of hard physical and artistic work and how far forward or sideways it could propel me how - I’d love to find out!
 

Alžběta Wolfová

“October saw autumn arrive with a vengeance. Bitter winds and driving rain fought to make up for the time lost to the long summer. Winter coats were dragged from storage with some reluctance, as umbrellas were ripped asunder. While the sun still held some warmth, noses were sent running, lips turned numb, and cheeks were painted a rosy red.”

Alys Rose Green (UK)

Is your drawing practice primarily concerned with ideas of abstraction ?
We are interested in an artist who has an experimental approach to drawing as abstraction, notation, repetition and/or geometry.

We are pleased to announce that Hannah Sarah James has been selected to be our partially funded artist in residence for March 2013.

For the residency I aim to continue to develop an exploration of repetitive linear drawing. I intend to further investigate the ways in which the manipulation of the simple line and the processes involved in this are affected by different site–specific contexts.

Through an engagement with new drawing techniques within a monochrome palette my intention is to delve into the theories and mysteries that surround the notion of the simple line.

One way in which I would like to further explore this would be through a scientific and mathematical interrogation of the process, working with the length of line, timing of application and points of change within the given space. Is it possible to formulate a mathematical equation for this? And if so what impact would this have on the development of my drawing practice?

My practice encompasses the gestural motion of the hand drawn mark. If an equation if found, at what point do the parallels intersect. Will delving into the meaning of the line take away from the curiosity created through the simplicity of an obsessive act, or will it heighten its abstraction?

Hannah Sarah James