Pass the Pencil
I continue to formulate ideas around doing a doctorate around drawing and what that might involve. I continue to have ideas around how drawing makes kin since the Research Paper and finding the whole idea so fitting to my thinking and so many of the projects I have done in the past. The Drawing Room Club continues to form the basis of my community based drawing and I will do January Drawing Club again and may have to change the name back to JDC as the other, much bigger Drawing Room is back up and running - it stopped during Covid so the name seemed free. Even if I don’t do more research I would like to keep going with the idea of community based art making. During a Council meeting recently I aired the idea of a Marlborough based drawing, which I think was well received and I will put forward for a budget after the MA is finished. I imagine asking local kids to draw an identity map of what it is to live in Marlborough and a sort of portrait of the high street. I imagine at the moment just black marker on long sheets of paper.
I have been considering how drawing might make kin online as well, which is the idea around Pass the Pencil. I am thinking about working on something collaborative, community based and kin making. The details are evolving.
In 2021 I worked with the kids to create a wall mural at my kids school, which I loved. We drew round 7 kids, one from each of the 7 school years from Reception to Year 6 to symbolise inclusion. We included the birds, which made reference to freedom. The kids wanted to paint themselves in the brightest colours and one boy was a recent arrival from Ukraine so the other kids painted him in blue and yellow as a mark of the war in his home country. He had not learnt much English but he understood entirely the generosity of this small gesture.
In 2019 I did a collaborative project with my kids’ school in Bavaria where the kids came to my studio and we created two large drawings, which are now still hanging in the school. I asked the kids what was important to them as Year 3 kids at Grundschule Mitte, Nördlingen and they said they identified most with playing recorder (their teacher was an excellent flautist) and sport with several kids playing for the local football team. The top left image is the images still hanging in the entrance of the primary school.
My first project of this kind was in 2015 in Berlin where I worked with a couple of other local artists to volunteer with recent migrant arrivals in the midst of the Migration Crisis that year. The aim was to work with the women who tended not to leave the centre and avoided hobbies and activities in favour of staying in their rooms, cooking and keeping company with other women. It was hard to draw the women out but some of the girls, particularly the teenagers were curious and we made two drawings around identity and where the girls saw their futures. The drawings were amazing but I don’t know what happened to them. There were about 6 I think each around 2x2 metres but these are the only two photos I can find. The language barrier meant we couldn’t always fully grasp what it was that the images portrayed but the garden was very important and the snowy one suggested integration into the cold, snowy Berlin they had suddenly found themselves in, completely new and foreign to many of the girls.
