Drawing for Our Lives

Reckitt, Helena; Fuller, Sabrina; and Torrell, Ehryn. 2023. 'Drawing for Our Lives'. In: Drawing for Our Lives. Drawing Room, London, United Kingdom 26 March 2024. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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With its potential for intimacy and vulnerability, and links to process, gesture, and the body, drawing has been central to feminist art. In this session inspired by Drawing Room’s intergenerational feminist exhibition ‘The Time of Our Lives’ we read from key feminist critical and curatorial texts on drawing, alongside the words of artists. Texts foregrounded how artists have used drawing to document and witness, as well as to resist and potentially heal from, painful experiences and historic legacies. They prompted discussion about drawing’s potential to generate “radically inclusive aesthetics” that stimulate “a global feminist politics of solidarity across differences” (Karen Kurczynski, 2023).

Together we read:

Part I: Critical & Curatorial Perspectives
• Catherine de Zegher, ‘A Century Under the Sign of Line: Drawing and Its Extension (1910-2010),’ in On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century by Cornelia H Butler and Catherine de Zegher, 2010.
• Karen Kurczynski: ‘Drawing in the 1990s: historical revisions and phantom visions’, 2023.
• Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon, ‘Approaching: drawing near,’ in Drawing Difference: Connections between Gender and Drawing, London: IB Tauris, 2016.
• Jacqui McIntosh, ‘Thinking with the mark: drawing as feminist tool,’ in The Time of Our Lives: Drawing and Feminism, Drawing Room, 2024.

Part II: Artists’ Reflections
‘The Time of Our Lives’ artists
• Sonia Boyce, Art Monthly : Article : Me, Myself and Others – Sonia Boyce interviewed by Isobel Harbison, April 2018; Courtney J. Martin, ‘Interview: Sonia Boyce’, in Courtney J. Martin and Emma Ridgway, Sonia Boyce, Feeling Her Way (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), pp16-17
• Claudette Johnson, interview with Marta Gnyp, December 2022
• Jade de Montserrat, Why I Draw, Phaidon, 2021; Janyce Denise Glasper Interviews Jade de Montserrat, Decorating Dissidence, April 2023
• Soheila Sokhanvari, Unpublished Interview with Jacqui McDonald, 2023

Additional artists
• Tania Kovats, Why I Draw, Phaidon, Agenda, 2024
• Phoebe Boswell, Artist Statement

Part III: In Conclusion
• Catherine de Zegher, “Drawing as Binding/Bandage/Bondage,’ Eva Hesse Drawing, in An Anthology: Women’s Work is Never Done (Gent, AsaMER, 2014), p.333-335