Bristol School of Art Media and Design
Bower Ashton Campus, Bristol
12 - 15 July 2005
Drawing Quarters – Practise-based four-day Symposium
Based on the success of the 2004 symposium, each practitioner interested in attending was able to elect themselves to a Drawing Quarter led by an international artist with a particular drawing philosophy. Each Quarter worked together in a studio environment over a three-day period on current or new projects. This allowed each participant to interrogate not only the nature of his/her practice and its relationship to drawing, but also to engage in some of the current debates within the sector’s growing drawing community.
An informal studio seminar was convened towards the end of each working day where a number of invited practitioners and theorists contributed to the process. This was then followed each evening by lectures from Adrian Searle (Guardian Critic) and Deanna Petherbridge (UWE Arnolfini Research Professor in Drawing).
On the final day of the symposium, the Drawing Quarters came together in an Open Studio exhibition at Bower Ashton. The event concluded with a symposium summary by Deanna Petherbridge and the event was to be marked by a publication.
Susanna Heron
Susanna Heron spent her childhood in Cornwall, and studied at Central School of Art and Design. She lives and works in London. Since 1995 Heron has become recognised internationally for her collaborations with architects and large scale site specific works notably for the European Union Council building in Brussels, The British Embassy Dublin, and Hackney Community College, London and The Phoenix Initiative, Coventry. She recently completed her first work in glass on a grand scale '36 Elements: Glass Wall' in Tokyo and Side Street for City Inn Westminster. She was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1999.
Tania Kovats
Tania studied at the Royal College of Art between 1988 and 1990. Following this she exhibited at the Barclays Young Contemporaries at the Serpentine Gallery in 1991. At this time she was making installations of utopian architectural spaces.
Tania’s work deals primarily with the experience and understanding of landscape. Her recent work has focussed on drawing and mapping landscapes and she has created bodies of work on imaginary and existing islands. Her current project involves mapping every individual, rock outcrop or island that surrounds mainland Britain.
Professor Deanna Petherbridge
Deanna Petherbridge was the first Arnolfini Professor in Drawing, a Research post which links Bristol School of Art, Media and Design with Arnolfini, Bristol.
She joined the University of the West of England in 2002 after a year as a research Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Between 2001 and 1995 she was Professor of Drawing at the Royal College of Art, London, where she launched the Centre for Drawing Research in 1997, the first doctoral programme in Drawing in the UK. In addition to running the drawing studio, promoting anatomy courses and supervising PhD and MPhil students, she also organised an international lecture series over three years, as well as conferences, seminars, celebrity workshops and drawing events. In 1997 she curated The Quick and the Dead: Artists and Anatomy, a National Touring Exhibition for the Hayward Gallery, and after a British tour, the exhibition was remounted in an extended form as Corps à vif: Art et anatomie , (1998) at the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva.
Petherbridge is both a practitioner and writer about art and has exhibited widely, with works in major collections. Most recently she undertook a four-month studio residency in the Faculty of Art and Design, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia culminating in an exhibition Two Cities: Two Modernities, (2003). Her mural commissions include a four-floor mural for the International Convention Centre in Birmingham, (1991) and she designed for The Royal Ballet at Covent Garden and Sadlers Wells during the 1980’s. Her practice is drawing-based, predominantly monochromatic ink and wash drawings on paper employing architectonic and geometric imagery in related series or large-scale multi-panelled works. Architecture is used metaphorically in the drawings to deal with social and political themes, including commentaries on Western and Asian cultures. Exhibitions on these themes have been toured by the British Council in India and South East Asian countries in association with lecture tours.
Avis Newman
Avis Newman is an exhibition curator and contemporary British artist who throughout her career has worked across a range of media, although since the early 1980s has been primarily associated with large-scale, minimalist drawings on unstretched canvas – usually pinned directly to the gallery walls for display.
Central to Newman’s own practice as an artist is the notion of drawing as the silent act of marking, gesturing and making signs. She describes drawing as the activity that is closest to pure thought.
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