Everything leaves a trace by Emily LaBarge ‘A line is a dot that went for a walk’, the Swiss–German artist Paul Klee famously said, ‘and a drawing is simply a line going for a walk’, as if, specifically in this medium, movement and space begin to unfold inexorably and take surprising shape, propelled by some internal living force, as soon as pencil is put to paper. All you need is that one dot – like a toe, a foot, a leg, restless, quivering, anxious to get going – and you are set. A whole world is waiting, and each artist – each draughtswoman – makes it in her own image. And what comes next? Questions of scale, perspective, composition, colour, background, foreground, support (the latter so elusive, so varied, in drawing perhaps more than any other visual discipline; estimates suggest there are over 3,000 varieties of paper, each with its own special properties). The sliding scale of representation, figuration and abstraction – and the continuum that carries them along as intimately imbricated approaches that refuse to settle – may turn this way and that depending on who, how, what, where, why, when is looking. In Heather Phillipson’s pen-and-ink drawing ? (2025) we see – sparely sketched in energetic black lines and swirls – a bumblebee and a Border Collie engaged in not so much a face-off as a perspective-off: who are you? WHAT are you? How big are you? Come to think of it, how big am I? What am I, for that matter, too? We do not know if these miraculous creatures really consider existential questions, but as the seemingly giant bee hovers in the sky, warily eyeing the curious collie below, we are reminded that these relational questions also govern our own place within the world and can change at any moment. Juliette Blightman’s Wheel of Fortune (2025), delicately rendered in pencil on paper, shows the carnival favourite seen from a distance, beyond a hedge of wild greenery that seems to flicker and wave with life, as though about to consume the wheel and its little pods, here frozen in motion. The lower edge of the image brings us back to earth: a plain wooden fence stretches across a large expanse of white, keeping us away from the fun. And yet we do not seem earthbound, from where we stand, but hovering in between ground and sky.
Figurative works can also be studies in colour and pattern. A candle and a trio of wilting tulips, say, can be an ethereal composition in pink, coral, lime green, pale magenta, ochre, taupe, cream or variegated shades of cobalt blue, which lighten (or darken) in proximity to a flame, as in Donna Huddleston’s Untitled (Light) (2026). Through her careful use of Caran d’Ache pencil on paper – blending, hatching, stippling – from edge to edge, Huddleston’s images, which often reference the illusionistic worlds of theatre and film, seem to float like an uncanny mirage. Similarly, but with entirely different materials, Chantal Joffe’s figurative pastel work sits between a recognisable image and a series of colliding planes of colours. Tooth Extraction (2026) is taken from a series Joffe made about having a tooth extracted after Christmas. The artist’s painterly roots are evident – the pastel is thick and luscious, spread across the card support with distinct gestures like brushstrokes, raised and textured in places, an impasto drawing – as are her art-historical references: ‘I was thinking of the [Édouard] Vuillard [painting] of his sister with a scarf tied round her head for the mumps’, she says, which can only be The Mumps (1892–93).1 Joffe’s work, like that of the French Nabi painter, is gorgeously diffuse, the artist’s tiny white face cocooned by a vast swathe of salmon pink. In other works, colour is a vehicle not just for space and image-making, but for less material properties like time, history, memory, inheritance, light and even vision itself. Deborah Lerner’s Double Diamond (For Margaret) (2025), made with oil and pen on paper, is a wash of watery violet veils streaked through with dusty ochres, haunted by the outlines of two irregularly shaped black diamonds suspended at either end of the ether. For the past three years, Lerner has been studying (and tracking down) the work of the twentieth-century British painter Prunella Clough. This recent work is part of a series undertaken while staying in the home of the art historian Margaret Garlake, who owns a number of Clough works. Lerner spent three weeks looking at Clough’s paintings and channelling the experience into her own images. In Margarita Gluzberg’s work, too, history and time – and with them their aesthetic lineages – seem to collapse