About the Project

The questions the project asks are:

• Is there a contemporary site/sight sensitive drawing aimed at interpretation, investigation and understanding the contemporary world and experience?

• How is drawing changed or advanced through these encounters?

• What is gained and where do we see the results?

More about the Project

There is growing appetite among contemporary artists to work collaboratively and across previously separate disciplines, and in drawing we see artists leaving the studio to seek out ever more specialist, rare and unusual applications of drawing.  This reveals a particular, fluid approach in drawing, a new sensitivity in which drawing is used by artists as a way of analysing, communicating and reflecting upon aspects of lived experience, some of which might normally be the province of other research professionals.  This practice of going out into the world, to look and seek out information and engage in dialogue through drawing bears similarities to John Ruskin’s statement on the purpose of drawing in the preface to his The Elements of Drawing (1857). Ruskin’s intentions are clear, he sees drawing as an instrument for gaining knowledge rather than an end in itself, he says

  I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing; and I would rather teach drawing that my pupils learn to love Nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw. (Ruskin, 1970, p.13)

In reading Ruskin we take ‘sight’ to mean the capacity to seek and understand, and where he elevates the value of ‘sight’ over  the worth of the artifact- the drawing- we interpret Ruskin as imploring the artist to engage with the subject above and beyond whatever benefits it may have for the drawing as an artwork.  For Ruskin the subject was Nature as God’s work, for the the artists involved in this project the subject ranges from the body and medical investigations to archaeology and the international trade in weapons.  What unites these artists and ideas is the will to use drawing to better understand the world.

As teachers of drawing and artists whose practices take us to usual and unexpected environments, where conventional drawing is counter intuitive, even impossible, we have come to realise a wider community of artists developing drawing in this way.  Additionally, and as a consequence of accepting the challenges to conventional drawing processes, of new locations and environments, we see in these artists (and others) high levels of formal innovation.  These are innovations arising from deep, sustained and sensitive engagement with events and activities outside the studio, in the world around them. This is not innovation for innovations sake.

This marks a shift firstly towards artists asking - not what drawing is, but what it can do, and secondly towards what Steve Garner argues research in drawing should do, namely to identify “the borders where the drawing world abuts the world of other disciplines, and to suggest where we might or should explore” (Garner, 2008, p.13).

Despite a number of artists now working in this interdisciplinary way, there has yet to be any substantial research or exhibitions which critically evaluates and reflects upon the collective significance of these practices.