The C4RD Community is a register of people, their work, and a broad range of statements on drawing.
It is an opportunity for those who draw to have an entry page that describes their approach within drawing, with a photograph of their work and a contact address and weblink. The Community demonstrates the breadth of drawing approaches in recent drawing and brings an international drawing community closer together. The Community offers the opportunity for your approach and work to be shared with others on the web, and for community members to share dialogue with each other, and allows C4RD to become aware of your work.
To join the community please send 150 words about your approach to drawing in the main body of your email (phrased in the first person) and your work or drawing interest – please try to emphasise the drawing component (theoretical, practical or spectating), an image (jpeg, gif, png) of no more than 1 MB.
Please send 1MB image and 150 words text to: info@c4rd.org.uk
Amy Green My work consists of continuous cycles of small-scale pencil drawings both in books and on loose-leaf paper. Through repetitive drawing practice the marks I make become familiar, I then work beyond my own familiarity, paring things down to their essential, their still points in the turning world. Each drawing feeds the next. There are questions but no conclusions. Although an entirely connected body of work, each page is individually composed, balanced and closed. The vocabulary I use as an artist is distinctive as ‘drawing’, that is line to paper, however, I believe drawing to be something less easily defined: as connected more to a process of thought than to physicality. In as much as a drawing is indefinable, the placement of a drawing and the placement of an audience will define it. I see the process of drawing and the act of exhibiting as two distinct phases within the one activity of drawing. minimarmot@hotmail.com
Vanessa Enriquez: I use drawing as a means to investigate the inner nature of things, to reveal the hidden connections and patterns in life and nature. In Zirkel, a project in collaboration with artist Ilya Noé, we experiment with circular gestures using chalk on black¬boards. The possibility to erase allows us to draw/sketch freely and learn from the process through continuous response to one another and the material, resulting in a graphical grammar of motion and notation that will continue to be developed, recalibrated and adapted as new types of movements are introduced into our shared drawing practice. Through the methodical exploration of angles, rotations, extents and limitations of different joints, and the repetition of specific gestures and sequences, we are able to trace our particularities and differences, as well as locate and measure the subtle variations of our movements and positions across time. In other words, we become compasses (Zirkel), and the resulting drawings become diagnostic maps. vankare@gmail.com
Vivian Gottheim: The records, traces of our collective memory in the form of emblems and signs, participate in the organization of our thoughts, as we attempt to make sense of our world. I collect, transform and schematize them, opening them onto a polysemic reading that often questions the cultural codes of which they are the vehicle. This poetic representation of daily elements, such as common objects, architecture, and parts of the body as well, is concerned with the subtle essence of things. The layering and the grading with different intensities of graphite pencils on paper contribute to intensify this vital idea, as the black and white drawings convey extended meaning as a never ending process. vgottheim@gmail.com
Ian Pyper: I have drawn ever since I can remember and I work obsessively, producing work that has been called ‘Future Primitive’/’Paleolithique Moderne’. Mostly using marker pens on paper, I have more recently developed a series of text drawings that incorporate a central ‘stick-man’ human figure. The current drawings are ideograms much influenced by science diagrams.
Eleanor Bedlow : I think though drawing, exploring and developing my interpretations of reality. The immediacy of drawing allows me to record these realities before they slip away. I also enjoy the range and personality a pencil can provide, enabling me to create epic drawings that the viewer could walk or fall into. I play with shifting spaces and land, tearing and joining within the worlds that I create. www.elbedlow.co.uk email: elbedlow.co.uk
Prem Sahib: The formal and structural qualities of line and geometry fascinate me greatly. My work considers the possibilities of the urban space as a site for intervention. With this I am interested in the physicality of mark making, how line and form can posses a space and mediate the relationship between people and objects prem95@hotmail.com
Cinzia Delnevo: Over the last years I created a series of drawings in the same way I created a series of actions in my previous works, in which the element of repetition was always present. Repetition is also my way to relate to automatic writing or automatism. In my practice I use it rigorously and extensively for several hours or even days on the same drawing tracing forms composed of segni minimi, or minimal abstract gestural mantra units to reach a point of deep dissociation from conscious thought. I am focused on the investigation of drawing without a drawing, in the sense of ‘representative’ initial project, not predetermined and in a state of absent will. The media I used allowed me to finely overcome the problem of representation leaving my hand fluidly ‘writing’ and transcending the idea of pre-ordered plan which is the meaning of drawing or designing. www.cinziadelnevo.com cinzia.delnevo(at)gmail.com
Eddy Peake: Poo it out, wee it out. Make it like lipstick. eddiepeake@yahoo.com
Olga Tsareva : The driving principle of my drawings is always the search for the equilibrium of three-dimensional illusion and a flat surface, the actual image and a sign, the real and a hint. I am not seeking a real image, but only its likening; an allegory, a transformation. In my latest series I see my task as to portray the very dynamics of life through various objects – fountains of water, branches of bushes, fluttering flags, or streaks of rain. Drawing offers the possibility of leaving any portion of working surface untouched. These clean white spaces are a very powerful, decisive component of drawing. The expanse which surrounds the actual subject is theoretical. Because of the white background the image can “be” without the completion of the environment, thus image lives in its own ideal space, in its own “universe”. olga@olgatsareva.com
Ozden Dora Ergun A ripple in the water, a cloud of volcanic ash, the darkness of a fairy tale, a pattern on a piece of textile, or in the sky, are all sources of inspiration for my work. My current exploration of drawing is underpinned by the translation of stitch into mark on paper. The repetitive nature of the process allows me to daydream in peace, to extend the instant a little and to capture fleeting sensations and memories. The process is also a re enactment of a cyclical battle between: obeying and rebelling, structuring and distorting, neatness and accidents, contemplating and acting, planning and intuition, parts and the whole. Enhancing this is my current mark of choice: the circle. A half moon inside a circle, circles within circles.
Ilona Szalay: Drawing is the starting point in all my work. I draw through ideas. It is the single most important component in my practice. I do not differentiate between media when drawing – a drawing can be any scale on any thing, it is the lines that are important. Often I draw with paint, most recently on glass. The rapidity and ease with which drawings can be made and remade on glass started me thinking about animation. I have subsequently made a series of stop motion animated drawings using oil paint on glass. These moving drawings exist only in recorded form as each drawing is extinguished to allow room for the next, as such the work is ephemeral and spontaneous, the images dissolving into each other and sliding across the surface of the glass. The pictures tell of metamorphosis, desire, dreams and death. ilonaszalay@yahoo.co.uk
Currently my drawing practice utilises a variety of mediums, including water soluble pens and wax rubbings taken on site specific locations as an exploration process for working.
I am also currently exploring working with stencils derived from printed wallpapers to produce large scale drawings, distorting and blurring the original image to create a series of drawings that are a kind of parody of a resolved printed image.
Incorporating texture directly taken from elements and objects has provided me with a platform to produce as a piece of work in its own right or a base to expand and utilise further in drawing.
These concepts are initially experimentations in sketchbook swatches form which I regard as a crucial process in my thought process to developing work. The sketchbook format also allows an immediacy capturing fleeting impulses.
I regard observation as a fundamental process in my drawings and experiments.
Rachael Elwell: Drawing is fundamentally a pleasurable activity; therefore the act of drawing is the central theme to my practice. From the subtleties of a single intuitive hand movement to the rigorous systems and procedures employed to mark a paper surface, an impulse to challenge the act of mark making is pivotal to the creation of my drawings. My work focuses on the relationship between chance as an essential dimension of art, and an interest in control and structure in the composition of image making. When one influences the other the work is subject to chaotic and boisterous results. An engagement with traditional, inventive and whimsical procedures introduces randomness into the process of my drawings. The ability to open up to chance is triggered by a personal desire to set something in motion, an investigation into the unknown: chance does not recognise boundaries. My drawings have a sensitive awareness to the potential of change and the desire to move beyond what is immediately apparent. The resulting works escape from the confines of initial methods, systems and processes by their own action, that plays a vital role in the creation of a drawing. www.rachaelelwell.co.uk www.rachaelelwell.blogspot.com www.artyarn.blogspot.com
James Hill My drawings are glimpses of private stories and secret human moments. there’s something deeply gratifying about drawing that doesn’t occur for me in any other media. i’ve spent most of my life looking for the best means of expressing myself visually and i’m always lead back to the drawing board. it’s the most immediate way to share a visual idea. set against a world of elaborate digital imagery i love the honesty and simplicity of charcoal. i feel a strong compulsion to resist using technology for it’s own sake in the creative process – a computer can generate lots of visual effects and convinces many users that they are suddenly artists. there’s no such place to hide on a naked page with nothing but a burnt twig to make your mark with. i’m quietly thrilled to be using the oldest artistic media in history to tell my twenty-first century tales. jfvhill@hotmail.com www.mrjimbo.com
Jenna Collins : I am concerned with how we make sense of the world as we find it by interrogating what is actually there. Informed by Albert Camus’ notion of the absurd, my subject matter is the sites and instants at which beliefs and universal givens meet the material world. After working with video for a number of years I have recently completed the MA Drawing at Camberwell where I examined my video sensibility in a drawing environment, asking such questions as ‘if the vanishing point in a drawn image in some way locates the viewer, can video offer a similar fixed point?’ Notions of observation, documentation, trace and line resonate in both fields, the result being drawn images that are essentially video in their logic, videos that are drawings in every way other than form, and installation work that operates in the interstice. jennacollins@yahoo.com
Will Wright: My work is concerned with exploring the extraordinary in the everyday, and finding potential in the seemingly banal. Themes of memory and time passing have been constant. Recently this has manifested itself in a series of paintings and drawings of old toys. These careworn objects act as repositories of emotion, being both deeply personal and universally recognisable. I tend to work slowly in charcoal and pastel from carefully constructed still lives as well as from my own photographic archive and found imagery. willwright71@hotmail.com
studios
Mark Farhall: My drawings are constructed on purpose and by chance with elaborate and obsessive techniques, using juxtapositioning assemblage, pattern-making, playing with illusions of three-dimensional surfaces and objects, to create improvisational works that are simultaneously energetic, complex, harmonious and naive. The drawn line serves to convey an aesthetic which permits a diversity of interpretations, an ambiguous line of both abstraction and construction. My drawings are infused with the other worlds of Jack Kirby, Chris Foss, and the futuristic architecture of the Japanese Metabolist Movement, Justus Dahinden, and Buckminster Fuller. www.markfarhall.com http://www.jerwoodvisualarts.org/page/3084/Mark/30
aliyahgator: I think about drawing as the way that I can communicate the ideas and creativity which is trapped inside my head, and which I cannot communicate. But it is not as simple as that… in order to be able to communicate I first have to study …. and studying, learning and discovering is part of the process. Communication is not a one way thing… and in studying I can start to discover what I really see, what I really percieve and what I really value. Then I am able to communicate it through my drawing. The good side of it is that every time I draw then I am learning and developing, and beginning to create a larger world both inside my head and out
Hugh McEwen: Hugh McEwen is an architectural assistant by day, whose personal work encompasses a range of mediums from pen and ink to pigment pastel. These drawings are often based on digital models that enable a hybridised production. The work itself looks to examine how a new civic style of building might appear and be represented, in order to rouse people from their pre-conceptions of political architecture. www.hughmcewen.com
Greig Burgoyne: I make wall drawings, often large in scale. My work is a result of visual and stylistic scavenging that engages with the found detritus and imagery that is broken, anonymous and the fragmented by-product of contemporary life. In my drawings I try to juxtapose what I have collected and collated. For me drawing is conveying the conflict between appearances and getting to the inner experiences and all that implies, it’s not definitive but part of a cycle. It could be reflective of the journey these found objects and images have taken in their Diaspora from ‘use’ value to detritus into memory. I want to reflect on the paradoxical power of semantics as a precursor to our value and belief systems and create a kind of hieroglyphics. My aims are to express how disparate the motivations may be in the transition from the private experience that drawing begins with, to the ‘spectacle’ of the public arena that it becomes. www.greigburgoyne.com
Alan Franklin: I like the notion of ‘making a drawing’, which suggests the physics and the performance of the activity. I focus on the relationship between my materials and myself as the principal agent in their manipulation. However I am also mindful of other agents, which may be drafted in to affect a desired outcome. I regard my drawings as ‘flat sculptures’ or shallow constructions. How they are made and then how they are perceived is their subject. The drawings proceed from a simple pre-determined rule or task. Labour, time and process are self-conscious ingredients, while repetition and imperfect control create incidents and accidents, which invariably give the drawings their character. I try to avoid any representation or deliberate illusion, but allow the structure of the drawing to create its own third dimension. I want my work to stray or wander away from what we think we know in order to be surprised, not by something new, but by something which is already there. www.alanfranklin.net alan@alanfranklin.net
Jens Hanke My drawings build up a linear structure suggesting architectural spaces. Those seem almost as ungraspable as the after-images of spectral outlines on our retinas that form with our eyes closed, depicting something real, but not allowing it to reach a recognizable form. They appear as a reminder of something that we cannot quite remember. The drawings are at the same time placed like virtual anchors in our world that is drifting apart.
Sophia Dixon Dillo: I draw with light. I intercept the movement of daylight across a surface with a clear, reflective material, in order to create linear abstractions of light and shadow. These works are drawn by time, witnessed by the viewer, and disappear as quickly as they came. Their forms are reminiscent of the movement and repetition of the pencil and the hand, yet created through minimal manipulation of a single non-traditional drawing material such as vinyl. These works are continually shifting and changing as the daylight moves. They are drawings in motion. The transient nature of the work is then documented, and reproduced in digital form. www.sophiadillo.com
Amanda Palmer: I create intensely worked pencil drawings from life, from photographs and from my imagination. I draw as a way to try and resolve a dissonance between science and religion. My drawings feature toys, plants, birds and insects. The compositions are often inspired by nursery rhymes or religious artworks. I am currently experimenting with drawing materials to see how each type of pencil reflects light, to create depth through the reflective quality of the drawing itself. Varying use between the matt quality of the carbon and the reflective nature of the graphite and oil pencil, I aim to heighten the feeling that the creatures and objects are floating in space. www.amandapalmer-art.com
Helen Sargeant: Drawing is a way of activating ideas. Through drawing I explore the vulnerable and fragile body that of the pregnant mother and the new born child. A visual language is created to communicate emotions directly. It feels primitive. A private world of the imagination is revealed through intense activity. When I draw ideas flow through the use of fluid materials such as ink, pencil, watercolour and graphite. Ink represents bodily fluids and the alchemy of life. There is a direct connection to time and memory, and the drawings aim to capture fleeting lived experiences. Motifs such as grid structures, breasts, orifices, arrows, ladders, organs, stitches, crosses, numbers and tubular structures permeate the space of the drawing. Through drawing I seek reflection and understanding of what it is to be human. Helen Sargeant http://www.helensargeant.co.uk
Iris Christine Aue I consider myself as a drawing artist in a broader sense. My works oscillate between two-dimensional drawing and three-dimensional sculpture. I’m dealing with the question of how I get beyond the edge of a sheet of paper right into the space. For me paper is a sculptural material which I bend, break and cut. It becomes an essential part of the picture as it melts together with the subject. During working process I make cut outs, draw and paint on them and finally sew the pieces together, bend and break them in order to create a figure or setting. In this way, the paper is not just the carring medium – it becomes part of the picture and by using its sculptural qualities it turns to spatial drawing. http://www.iris-christine-aue.com/en/
Mike Newman: The image I have is of a work made from cut card placed behind a dual layer of perspex with draft paper in between. By combining this cut card with draft paper I completed this illusion with a result similar to a carefully rendered pencil drawing or even a crafted airbrush work. The reality of this illusion was that beneath the layers were embedded a physical deceit. www.mike-newman.co.uk mikenewman1st@gmail.com
Phoebe Boswell : Concerned with the dualities and conundrums of contemporary society, I use drawing as a tool in which to order and present my observations. Born in Kenya, brought up in the Middle East, and educated in the UK, I have experienced the very transient nature of our global world. Shifting patterns of migration ensure that personal identities have become complex and splintered by contemporary life, and placed in a state of constant redefinition. The result is contradictory; it creates a sense of both immense freedom and overwhelming flux. It is this subtle contradiction, this middle point, which I seek to explore within my work. The use of charcoal or graphite means that, at any moment, the motif can disappear through erasure, and change direction through redrawing. This destabilises notions of permanence in the finished drawings and in-so-doing, raises philosophical questions as to the gravity of the content. phoebe_boswell@yahoo.co.uk
Simon Parish: Drawing allows me to operate in a space that is neither painting nor photography but is something like them both. The particular materials I use, marker pens, allow me to think like a painter without painting. Drawing can operate quickly and efficiently and have the clarity of photography. I like this hybrid state and feel my drawing operates in a place away from modern technology and back to the handmade. I collect photographs as source material for my drawings. These range from my travel photographs to those found in newspapers and magazines to those sourced from the internet. The selections of photographs I work with often reflect an emergent aesthetic which has been observed in the flickr phenomenon; yet my selections can also reach beyond this aesthetic. The way I select and collect images leads to the emergence of subject matter that resists easy classification. Still there is a recognizable ‘eye’ and sensibility at work, and a recognizable consistency elsewhere – in the ways that the images are rendered in marker pen for example.
Livia Salome Gnos It is evident that my visual work belongs to what we can see. But how to define the borders between reality and abstraction? Could abstraction be named as such only until what is seen is understood? As long as an object is still, it is easy to capture its image. But what about elements in transformation or in ambiguous states? I’m trying to grasp some of the universal language of transformations. When I’m drawing, sketching a line, it is as if I let my pencil see that part of perception, which is difficult to pin down on a picture using film or photography. In this sense, I am mostly interested in the limits of visible and invisible, training my eyes to perception which is both observing and visionary. mail@liviagnos.ch www.liviagnos.ch www.liv-pluto.blogspot.com
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Mia Pearlman: My work is meditation on chance, control and the ephemeral nature of reality. The forms in my work exist on the brink of being and not being, free from physical constraint. Imaginary landscapes are shown frozen in mid-evolution, on the brink between contracting or expanding, solidifying or breaking apart. My goal is to find the picture beyond the big picture, the space between the nucleus and the electron, the moment between creation and destruction. I draw by subtraction, in the form of cut paper, sanded paper, and the use of negative space. I consider myself a sculptor who draws, and the concerns of sculpture are of paramount importance to me: three-dimensional space, depth, movement, volume, weight, etc. Recently I found a way to fuse these interests in the form of sculptural cut paper installations. I’m very excited the way negating space creates space in these pieces. miapearlman@yahoo.com
Peter Matthews: Sometimes drawing for me shares similarities to the methods of geological surveys and investigations. The spatial dimension and the sense of permanence indelibly scorched on every piece of paper, especially the edge and perimeter, have been physically shattered in this new series. Puncturing and fracturing the surface of the paper was created in a quite controlled but spontaneous manner involving driving nails through the paper around the full perimeter of its edge while passing through each corner. A continuous long strand of thin copper wire was then doubled around each nail forming, conceptually and practically, a magnetic, continuous circuit that is tightly bound to the surface of the paper and effectively acting as an electrical conductor. ..the drawings from this new body of work have been produced after spending extended, uninterrupted hours while physically in, not next to or beside, the Pacific Ocean. mr.petermatthews@gmail.com
Sarah Casey My practice is characterised by an ongoing socially-engaged probing of the delicacy associated with drawing. Current research examines areas of shared practice between scientific and studio methods by usurping procedures designed to make sense of the visually elusive from of fields such as conservation and medicine. These technologies are deconstructed though drawing and reinterpreted to explore possibilities of hybrid forms of draughtsmanship. Rather than simply asking that introspective and increasingly hackneyed question: “what is drawing?”, my practice attempts to interrogate the activities of researchers who share values with a particular form of studio practice (one concerned with damage, contact, delicacy, sensitivity, traces) to ask “what might drawing share?”. If drawing, once integral to scientific knowledge production, is now said to mimic everyday acts of touching and disguise boundaries between art and the everyday, what potential might it have for visualising what Bruno Latour has termed a “hidden geography”: an invisible web of relations uniting disparate professional, academic or political bodies? sarahmariecasey@hotmail.com
Aimee Lax I explore themes of attraction/repulsion, familiar/unfamiliar and other-wordliness by examining the conventions of displaying nature within our culture. Drawing is a huge contributor to this process. I do not attempt to present simulations of nature, rather the (sometimes semi-conscious) drawing process enables a deeper understanding of the essence or character of a live object, resulting in messages that celebrate artifice as well as our situations for viewing nature in a cultural construct. aimee.lax@network.rca.ac.uk www.aimeelax.co.uk
