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Drawing in Social Space: Mutual Dependency
November 2022 to March 2023
Drawing in Social Space is a knowledge exchange partnership between Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London and Drawing Room, two Southwark based institutions. Occurring when Drawing Room has no premises, the partnership seeks to explore drawing beyond the gallery walls, expanding and exploring practice and knowledge, whilst creating connections locally and globally.
This second project brings together Gluklya, a Netherlands based Russian artist, BA Fine Art students, and Parents and Communities Together (PACT), a Citizens UK community-support project empowering parents and addressing early years development, isolation and maternal wellbeing. Over five months participants connected through online and in-person exchanges to facilitate activities across countries.
Working across drawing, clothing, text, installation, video, performance and participation, Gluklya explores justice and resistance in society. She embraces the personal stories of her collaborators, analysing them and revealing the conflict between political systems and a person’s inner world. Her process, often playful, creates conditions for people from different social backgrounds to come together. Her work highlights the hidden tactics that people might invent to empower themselves and navigate repressive structures.
A stranger to Southwark, Gluklya invited students across different Fine Art disciplines to tell stories of their locality. Through different modes of collaboration, interviews with residents and passers-by, walking and mapping in Peckham and Camberwell, they considered the relevance of place and drawing as a creative process to gather information and forge connections. Their investigations and shared experiences have inspired a range of artworks: drawings, prints, paintings, digital work, a film and interventions in public space.
Informed by their research students devised workshops for local PACT groups, expanding their understanding of creative storytelling and experience of working in new contexts. Central to PACT’s ethos of being a project run by and for parents, trained parent-leaders advised students on their ideas in focus group meetings. Their vision for these workshops was a space for parents
and children to connect and explore through sensory play, and to have accessible activities that could be recreated at home. Over one week, conversation and translation, large-scale drawings of cities, markets, fruits and vegetables, colourful lines, shapes and textures, cardboard fruits and traces of hands and toy cars dipped in paint emerged.
A local church used by the Be Well Wednesdays group was transformed into The Club of Unpredictable Drawings, a new game devised by Gluklya to explore how drawing, movement and play can support wellbeing at PACT. With drawing materials attached to their bodies, parents, children and students moved spontaneously and performatively through an immersive space, marking their presence and time through gestures, poses and improvised actions. What occured was a sense of freedom, focusing on experimental and loose processes rather than perfect outcomes and a co- created artwork. In response to the project Gluklya created a series of drawings, narrating and interpreting the encounters, stories, places and experiences.
The title for the zine, Mutual Dependency, was arrived at while reflecting on the project. Like a spider web it relied on many interconnecting and supporting lines: a curiosity and appreciation for drawing, partners with shared and varied ambitions, collaborative strategies, reciprocal exchanges of knowledge and ideas, the creation of artworks and the power of drawing to bring people together.
Project Curators and Facilitators: Renee Odjidja, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Camberwell College of Arts, UAL Misty Ingham, Projects and Partnerships Curator, Drawing Room
Zine designed by Project Team: Hugh Smyth, Project Placement student Severina Dico-Young, Project Placement student Misty Ingham and Renee Odjidja
Artworks: Gluklya BA Fine Art students PACT members
Photography: Project Team Esme Wedderburn
This partnership was conceived by Kelly Chorpening, Professor and Chair of Art, University of Nevada Reno, USA (formerly Programme Director Fine Art, Camberwell College of Arts, UAL)
experiment with scale and to overlap our individual drawings.
Geraldine, Patrick and Shaowei
mirroring the way that young children do. The experience of sitting on the floor and using bright colours encouraged us to
for PACT through a large-scale collaborative drawing. This helped us to get back in touch with drawing, as a way to play
consider catering for; and at attainable prices.
After our visit, we came back to the studio to explore activity ideas
The markets in Peckham play such an important role in providing regional ingredients that wider chain supermarkets don’t
From Mine to Yours (Routines)
Considering and understanding Southwark, as a new home on foreign land, we as international students decided to approach this project from a personal perspective. The texts are phrases that we often text or tell each other, and the location where the drawings are displayed are where these conversations usually happen. The drawings were printed out, stuck with blue tack and left there. This way, a map of our friendship and the routines we have created through living and studying together is visualised across Camberwell. - Agnes and Adelina
Our aim for the Unit 6 Collaboration project was to create an archival documentation of Peckham. During our interviews and research we responded to people, settings and perspectives utilising drawing, painting and film. We wanted to highlight the collaborative aspect of our urban explorations, celebrate the richness of our area while questioning negative preconceptions and stereotypes associated with Peckham. The culmination is a 12-minute film combining audio and video recordings, photography, drawings, paintings and digital work created in response to our findings.
Amara, Fahimeh, Katie, Majo, Marnie, Marileze, Mary, Nikos, Shamss, Simran, Zahna
Watch: youtu.be/VnnG3ovBXt8
Gluklya
“The object is not precious but the moment is.”
”Dreaming as resistance and leisure.”
“In Spain it’s marrón but in Latin America we say café.”
“What’s the monument of Peckham?”
Gluklya
Spontaneous drawing session is dedicated to Well Being.
Wellbeing is the abstract notion and because of the nature of its abstract universality it is open for our interpretations. I propose to think about wellbeing through the lenses of imagination and unpredictability. Unpredictability can be resolved through the spontaneousness, which in turn can be understood as a result of the freedom to do the action which is coinciding with our entire feeling of truth, which in other turn can be understood as a creation of the entire free space which might lead to the act of the creativity.
The other notion I propose to explore during our encounter is the movement. We are all migrants and defending the idea of the rights of migration we are interest in moving matters. Combination of moving and drawing might bring us to the deconventionalisation of the idea of drawing as just sitting in one place and focusing on the particular. When we are lost the time is our friend.
Performative encounter with PACT + Students
What does wellbeing mean to you?
- Feeling of being present
- Feeling of being free
- Feeling relaxed and quiet inside my
- head
- Body movement
- Able to talk with myself calmly
- Feeling happy
- Let it be
- Discernment: I used to get triggered
- easily, now I take care of myself
- better and am more aware of myself
- When my children are happy, I am
- happy
- Feel connected to myself by listening
- to my body
I feel much more free after the workshop, and realise I don’t have to take things seriously all the time. It’s ok to be silly and playful
It’s lovely to work with different people during the workshop
I feel happier as the session allowed me to release some happy hormone
With special thanks to: Gluklya
Students:
Adelina Hess
Agnes Brandstaetter
Amara Pramesti
Apollos Gurung
Fahimeh Haghshenas
Freyja Needle
Geraldine Glaser
Katie Tynan
Majo Sandoval Alfonso
Marnie Vickers-Graver
Marileze Canlas
Michelle Di Leo
Molly Burrows
Nikos Kourous
Patrick Peace
Shamss Al-Khafaf
Shaowei Lai
Simran Chana
Zahna Scott
PACT:
Deshni Chetty, Associate Parent Organiser
Ellie Demetri, Project Manager for Mental Health
Estefania Isabel Burgos Cordero, Parent Leader
Helen Hailu, Parent Leader
Layla Meerloo, Senior Project Manager
Mena Amnour, Parent Organiser
Mery Calderon, Associate Parent Organiser
Sharon Awotubo, Parent Leader
Werda Omar, Projects Coordinator
PACT members
Project Team:
Hugh Smyth
Misty Ingham
Renee Odjidja
Severina Dico-Young
