I am an artist who often works with textile. I define the language of art as an expression of thoughts and feelings that are difficult or unable to be entirely verbally communicated. We use colours, symbols etc., to express ourselves in the most sincere way, looking forward to be heard and understood. As a form of art, textile holds its own special language. I have learnt from my own experience that textile can be a very warm and intimate way to show love to our loved ones. In this project, I decided to embody my growing love for my boyfriend through textile. I thought it would be interesting because my love for him is overwhelming to me, I always find it hard to describe my feelings because it is so much more than an “I love you�, but surprisingly I found my textile practice is helping me describe these feelings.
YIN CHUNZHI (AMBER) Email: amberthepooh@gmail.com Instagram: @friedchickencrispy_ Website: amberyinart.wordpress.
com
I am an artist working between China and the UK. My recent work investigates the relationships between rapidly changing aesthetic sensibilities and plastic surgery. We carry the burden of being visually judged by those we know and strangers from afar. Coupled with the mass media, individuals feel increasingly pressured to meet imposed ideals of looking healthy, fit and attractive. Plastic surgery appears to have become the most popular, fast and effective way to pursue the perfect appearance. I attempt to open up the debates around plastic surgery. I hope to add new perspectives to the debates, ideas and discussions around this issue, from the accusations of ideological manipulation that some feel motivate patients seeking surgery, to the argument that to condemn cosmetic enhancement is a repressive act. Although identifying as a feminist, I remain open-minded and merely hope to open up further questioning as opposed to expressing a specific view.
YAWEN DU (PONY) Email : ponydu@126.com Instagram : @Pony.Du Wechat :
Sound Drawing is a development of the transformative lines of vibrations, flows and emotions that emanate from sound. This installation alludes to a subtle relationship between mystery and subject that I conceive as an important spiritual connection. ‘Kong’ is a Zen idea and it means ‘empty’ in writing. I work with this philosophical concept through my drawing practice as I consider notions of elegance and transference. I write about my memories and translate them into sound. Yet I strive to keep the audio experience ‘empty’, as if a space is awaiting to be filled. I aim for people to reflect on my life in ways that lead to new perceptions of their own. The mysterious monochrome drawings I present emerge from the sound of nature: purposefully incomplete and without constant definition. I produce work that is a composition of the viewers’ reflections and memories of themselves.
YIXUAN DU Email: 332921406duyi@gmail.com Instagram: @duyi9124 Website: yixuandu.wordpress.com
Copying is an integral tool within drawing. It is a method of experiential learning or learning through doing. But art history and its institutions control what content is available to copy and its context. My drawing practice questions and disrupts this influence, exploring the margin between what a practitioner does and what art history says they do. Investigating my reliance on art history revealed a lack of drawings by artist women from which to copy and learn. Searching archives and collections for an art historical lineage for my practice left me frustrated and disappointed, but established the importance of writing, annotation and marginalia in the development of my critical voice. Whilst the role and value of copying is contested, I find it to be a powerful means of interrogating what art history tells us to think and establishing our own, often oppositional standpoint.
EMMA LOUISE HOLLAWAY Email: elhvisual@outlook.com Instagram: @elhvisual Website: elhvisual.com
Thinking through drawing, my practice is concerned with the spatial sense of absence, time, and movement. I am curious about what we don’t yet know, what we can’t see, and the space or gaps where this information may be held. I relate to Heidegger’s concept of ‘Being in the World’. My sense of being part of the collective maps onto the resultant drawings, in which multiple marks swarm, cylindrical folds of manuscript pile up and drawn threads unravel. I consciously add value to my experience of drawing by opting to make work that will extend my perception of time. I employ a variety of different approaches including print, pencil on paper, 3D and video.
CAROLINE HOLT-WILSON Email: carolineholtwilson@ googlemail.com
Website: carolineholtwilson.
wordpress.com
My drawing practice emerges from a decade of working in professional architecture and urban design between Iran and Canada. Considerations of social, geopolitical and cultural differences have led me to explore the blending of transnational experiences and memories, both my own and collective. For me, displacement has incurred a loss of belonging or homely ambiance. I tame the chaotic through repetitive visualization, towards creating a more controlled and calm mental state. My current work draws on the forms and ideas of ancient Persian sacred geometry, urban fabric and pattern. I appropriate space hierarchy, centralism, vertical axis, and orientation: architectural principles traditionally employed to create spiritual unification. I use hand-based, digital and printmaking processes to transform these methods into conceptual and perceptual layers. My intention is to both articulate and generate a sense of harmony, unity, order, and balance through drawing.
SEPIDEH KHALILI Email : khalili.sepideh86@gmail.com Instagram : @sepideh_drawings Website : sepidehkhalili.weebly.com
I deconstruct, manipulate and re-present fragments of the past such as furniture and flotsam. In doing so, I give the intrinsic narratives and memories held within these objects new value and form. I wish to materialize the embodied ways of learning and making that have ceased to be inherited. The ‘drawings’ that result reflect memories of life before mass production and so foreground the ecological. I am concerned with the endless production of ‘stuff’ and pollutant by-products that result from the commodified condition of contemporary living practices. For example, our beaches appear clean. Yet under scrutiny, the washedup flotsam becomes apparent. Waste plastic echoes natural forms, camouflaged through simultaneous weathering. I play with these analogous, virtually indistinguishable surfaces, attending to the visceral, sensorial and emotive. The seductive aesthetic juxtaposed with the pollutant, prompts the viewer to question and reflect on the everyday.
GLYNIS LAMOND Email: glynislamond@gmail.com Instagram: @glynislamond Website: glynislamond.wixsite.
com/portfolio
I am a visual artist working between the UK and Australia. A ‘drawer’ first and foremost, I use charcoal, graphite, coloured pencils honouring the texture, immediacy and honesty of drawing. My practice uses personal mythology to explore isolation and connection. I am interested in the contrast between self and other and the systems of separation and unity that operate throughout the human condition. The human head fascinates me. I tend to draw the back of them or from above, so hair is prominent. Our hair is a key to how we present ourselves, so the concerns that influence my delicate hairlines are complex and expansive. But my work is not about hair, it is a segue between self and other, of what it means to be, feel and see as a human. Completed works conceal a personal moment, a complex intimacy, a shift within, but have been generated through external engagement with the other.
JO LANE Email: jolane302@gmail.com Instagram: @__jolane__ Website: jolane.com
My drawing practice utilises the techniques of visual reportage to explore familial relations in the context of globalisation and human mobility. Combining found archival imagery and spontaneous mark-making, I interrogate the contemporary ‘homesickness’ arising from displacement. I attempt to address the shifting memories and altered sense of belonging this creates through ‘drawn’ photographs, line drawings, paintings and print. I am specifically concerned with how concepts of the maternal affect the lives of most people in some way, shape or form. The love of a mother is one of few fixed points of reference shared across cultural, social and geographical divides. I attend to the gestures, comments and events that make us think of home and mothering. There is a unique form of physical and emotional support one gets from family that is hard to live without. I hope to reveal ways of helping myself and other students to deal with being away from home.
HAOKUN MAI Email: haokun.mai@outlook.com Instagram: @haokunmai Website: haokun.wixsite.com/
mysite
Exploring the boundaries of Portraiture is the core of my practice. After visiting HM Pentonville Prison, I realized that I wanted to dignify the inmates for allowing me to draw them. I chose an institution since I believe that they establish our ideas. As a Drawer, I was trying to find a place where I could understand myself, thus, I decided to go to a prison and discover emptiness. My increasing interest in the marked and unmarked space has heightened the need for making new solutions for the self-contained object and the ground. The study of ‘emptiness’ has become an important aspect to the development of my artwork. Therefore, the marked and unmarked space is the unity of the division between mind and hand, and the subject is a reflection on Memory.
JUAN CARLOS SANCHEZ SABOGAL Email: jcssabogal@hotmail.com Instagram: @juancarlossanchezsabogal Website: jcsasa.weebly.com
In my practice I use drawing as a tool to question the cinematic image. My work comes from a desire to ‘keep’ film’s images; to take static extracts from something that was originally supposed to move to bring the narrative across. My source material is housed within Western mainstream and arthouse movies, from which I intuitively collect stilled fragments by taking screenshots. An archive of found-footage has thus emerged, consisting of thousands of disjointed film images that serve as references for large-scale pastel drawings and installations. The presentation of these works refers back to cinema and its inseparable relationship with theatre. The fictional worlds of film and fine art are windows that mirror the socio-political issues of the society in which they exist. Recent works have reflected research on representations of women in film and explore relationships between male and female characters.
ELLIS SCHEER Email: ellisscheer@gmail.com Instagram: @ellissch Website: ellisscheer.nl
The historical is central to my drawing practice, so archive and museum collections provide me with a wealth of material with which to create. My view of history is that it is a living entity; one that reconfigures itself in cycles instead of being something that is fixed or entirely wedded to the past. My current work has evolved out of my research around indigo, once one of the worlds most valued and beautiful pigments. This colour connects to the deeply mystical and also to great suffering. My exploration mediates in the spaces between these extremes as a form of ritual; a way of examining loss, recovery, preservation and transcendence.
CHARMAINE WATKISS Email: hello@charmainewatkiss.com Instagram: @mswatkiss Website: charmainewatkiss.com