At a recent International Drawing and Research Institute Conference, Professor Tim Jones from the Glasgow School of Art summed up a discussion on drawing, with the following key points:
- drawing is visible thinking
- drawing, like sleeping, can be likened to ‘disengagement of the clutch’
- drawing is making the familiar strange, and making the strange familiar
- drawing is finding areas of commonality, difference becomes the value
- drawing is everything from the readymade to appropriation
- successful drawing is ‘letting the drawing get on with itself’
- ‘let the eye speak - no point in making a phone call without dialing the number.’ As artists we have the means to know how to ‘make the eye speak’.
Drawings: Out of Exile is an investigation into some contemporary drawing practices taking place in New Zealand. We have gathered together 30 artists who work in completely different ways and with completely different materials to explore the range of practices which constitute drawing today.
Included in this exhibition are cartoon and graffiti artists, whose work - until the last decade - would have been seen on the outside of the gallery rather than in an exhibition inside, but now acknowledged as key members of the texture of fine art.
In the present era, style and autography are no longer synonymous; yet drawing retains an authority over the notion of authenticity and affirms that the artist’s hand still counts in the primary expression of ideas. Drawing holds a unique position within the spectrum of the arts, for while maintaining its own tradition it has also served the most subversive of purposes.
Ephemera
→ Drawings: Out of Exile, 2005, exhibition card