RESTORATION / 6-week program
With each drawing there is marking, making, mending, unmaking, remaking, and rest. Drawings are full of lines of connection that weave together across a surface.
Our lines of connection can be many things from thick tarry slugs of line to threads of silk woven together like whispery cobwebs. They can be like temporary trails in the sky marked by an aeroplane, or permanent scars creased deep with time. Our lines can be performative, acted out in space and time to audience, or as quiet and domestic as criss-crosses in a chopping board. With our lines we build shapes, tones, colours, images, words, and most importantly meaning. Our lines of connection can become confused and broken.
Restoration aims to support how to reconnect and restore new connections through a program of shared drawing experiences
and dialogue.
Join us to explore how each drawing is a net we have made and mended to catch something of value to us. We cover and uncover a drawing with tones and erasures. We flood and dry out a drawing with washes. We can cut, score, unravel, stich together or repair an image. We invite you to consider how with each mark we make, we are mending, returning, and restoring something to ourselves.
RESTORATION will begin at the start of the year, a time for repair and restoration. In the northern hemisphere our winter hibernations are at their deepest before the light begins to return, the soil begins to warm where we sense the Imbolc stirrings of early spring energy. When we look around us there is so much damage in our troubled world, things broken or not taken care of.
We will look at drawing practice as an encouragement for us to take more care, mend something.
RESTORATION will ask if drawing can support some mending of our damaged environment. The healing process begins with noticing. Drawing is a tool of noticing, a tool of restoration. A drawing practice helps us create an empathetic feedback loop between us and nature and the ecologies we are part of.
RESTORATION will invite you to carefully unpick the rules that you apply to your drawing, and the rules that others use to make theirs, gently taking them apart to re-imagine them and start something new. What does time spent drawing return and restore to you?
Deadline: 24th November 2024
Selected Participants Informed: 2nd December 2024
Introductory Session: 16th December 2024
Start date: 6th January 2025
End date: 14th February 2025
see How to Apply
PAST:
SHADOWLANDS / 5-week program
8th January - 9th February 2024
Drawing is an energetic dance between light and dark. The approaching shorter days and longer nights of winter in this part of the world put us all into the shadow of the season.
Drawing is a perfect medium to explore these darker days full of the drama of winter light and cold suns where we have more time with the moon and stars. Shadowlands is full of the lights we switch on and the shadows that they cast. The screens that glow in the evening, the candles and fires that we ignite, the acidity of street lights, and the company we blanket ourselves with to keep warm.
The shadowlands are also places at the political margins, at the edge of things, again a space drawing is well suited to occupy.
In the dark our other senses become more alert as we explore gardens glowing at night. The kingdom of plants in the northern temporal zone start to retreat back underground to escape frosts leaving behind the bare bones of skeletal trees.
We also slip into winter’s hibernation, sleeping and dreaming more.
What better way to notice, celebrate and play in the Shadowlands than with drawing.
Watermarks.
6-Week Program
17th April - 26th May 2023
This was our fifth six-week online drawing program. Watermarks used drawing to
explore our relationship with water.
Our bodies are two thirds water. Seventy per cent of our blue planet’s surface is water
but we are land-based land-focused creatures.
Nine artsts explored their liquid selves through drawing. They made drawings of, or in,
or with, water. And considered water in its many states, flowing, or frozen solid or as
vaporous clouds.Drawing has its own conversation with water: washes, drips, stains,
dissolves, floods, saturation, bleeds, melts, evaporations -and watermarks. Drawing
materials can even be divided into wet or dry materials.
We would invited: Sarah Adams, Anne-Marie Atkinson, Agnes Becker, Barbara Cheney,
Hanne Husa Dale, Ilona, Joanna Leah, Carrie Stanley, Rachel Welford
to come and play in the puddles.
WATERMARKS PUBLICATION
Drawing Correspondence Six Week Program - NATURE AS WITNESS
(2nd May - 10th June 2022)
This was our third six-week, online program that invited participants to think about
how we study and interact with nature, and how this encounter with the non-
human or beyond human is explored through drawing.
Participants were: David Barron, Annie Berriman, Caroline Burgess, Lucy Crouch,
Laura Fox, Peter Gates, Sandra Partington, Jenny Purrett, Joanna Rucklidge, Fran
Woolf.
NATURE AS WITNESS PUBLICATION
Drawing Correspondence Six Week Program - THE BODY I AM IN
(19th October - 23rd November 2021)
This was the second themed six-week program, a different version to the first,
it included: guided live drawing sessions, drawing project prompts, group discussions
and individual meetings, connection to a community of drawing practitioners
Participants were:
Garry Barker, Elaine Burke, Yvonne Crossley, Yota Karas, Johanna Ljungberg,
Jacqueline Nicholls, Lucia Olivieri, Peisley, Katya Robin, Alys Scott-Hawkins, Clare Smith,
Victoria Walters
THE BODY I AM IN PUBLICATION
Drawing Correspondence Six Week Program - GROW
(22nd February - 2nd April, 2021)
This was the first themed six-week program that consisted of shared drawing
sessions, prompted independent drawing projects, group and individual
tutorials, feedback, surgeries and recommendations. These programs are designed
to support the growth and critical evolution of your drawing practice in a supportive
atmosphere.
Participants were:
Ruth Broadbent, Hondarza Fraga, Aileen Harvey, Liz Horn, Edward Martin,
Kim Plowright, Sarah Praill, Petra Regent, Anna Rhodes, Nicola Scrutton.
Now working together as HYPAE COLLECTIVE
and were led through the program by all three Drawing Correspondence
founding mentors, Chloe, Tania and Anita.
We connected participants to wider drawing networks and experiences through
digital exploration with National Collections and guests to the program:
Matthew Avignone, Akash Bhatt, Ioi Choi, Yutavia George, Jo Lewis, Gary Sangster, Emma Talbot.
The Drawing Correspondence Six Week Program concluded with an online
presentation of the work in the form of a publication.
GROW PUBLICATION