Featuring work by: Louisa Buck, The Collaborative Drawing Research Team (Philippa Lyon, Patrick Letschka, Tom Ainsworth and Inam Haq), Gavin Fry, Jackie Lightfoot, Jeremy Radvan, Curie Scott, Francis Wells, Fiona Wilson
This exhibition was organized around a common interest in the line’s utility among members of the Drawing Research Interest Group (DRIG). We consider drawing as an arts practice, a research method and as having multiple interdisciplinary applications.
The potency of the line can result from ancient or contemporary technologies of mark-making. Yet there is sometimes a sense in higher education that drawing is lodged in a pedagogical past, when observational drawing formed a core part of art school training. For the exhibitors in this show drawing has a long tradition, but it is one that continues to evolve, investigate and inquire into new areas. The process of drawing continues to be crucial in exploring a wide range of issues. As artists, makers, research students, researchers and lecturers we are concerned with the significance, practice and potential of drawing, whether with lines or dots, in clay or textiles, on paper or through software programmes and performance.
Drawing can be a practice that holds our attention in contemplation and which, as a finished piece, asks the viewer to dwell on issues of temporality and perception. It can provoke questions about bodily and metaphysical disturbances, for example, in relation to memory and identity, or medical and surgical communication. A cluster of research carried out by DRIG members investigates the relationships between drawing practices in different professions and in cross-disciplinary education. This cluster has grown through a collaborative research relationship with the Brighton and Sussex Medical School and with medics and surgeons elsewhere, as reflected in some of the work in this show.
