DRAW Space are delighted to collaborate with The Kedumba Drawing Collection to present DRAWING ECOLOGIES – an exhibition that explores drawing as a method of interpreting and relating to the natural world, traced through The Kedumba Collection’s archive of Australian contemporary drawing.
Curated by Eva Nolan
Established in 1990 by Jeffrey Plummer, with the support of the Blue Mountains Grammar School, The Kedumba Drawing Award continues as one of the longest-running, most prestigious acquisitive drawing prizes in Australia. Residing in a gallery on the school grounds in Wentworth Falls, the collection quietly chronicles 35 years of Australian drawing history. Meandering through the myriad rooms of the Kedumba Gallery, multiple worlds unfurl through the marks of some of Australia’s most celebrated contemporary artists.
A thematic thread woven throughout the collection’s extensive lineage is the representation of nature. From expressive landscapes to detailed animal studies, these images resonate with one another to create an ecology of drawings, collectively navigating the storied relationship between humanity and the natural world. Curating a selection of work from The Kedumba Collection, DRAWING ECOLOGIES explores the role of drawing in humankind’s perpetual contemplation of – and connection with – the natural world.
DRAWING ECOLOGIES features the work of:
Chris Casali, Maryanne Coutts, Lucy Culliton, Anna Glynn, Anne Judell, Leith Maguire, Martin Rek, Mike Riley, Luke Sciberras, Adriane Strampp, Claire Tozer and Wendy Tsai.
Curatorial Essay by Eva Nolan
A hare poised to attention, ears alert, dark eye cautiously surveying the world, rugged fur rendered in charcoal. A lone willow tree delicately etched in graphite, lush foliage billowing around its sturdy trunk. The silhouette of a kangaroo blotted with ink, liquid turbulence churning together sharks and pelicans, quolls and grass trees. A landscape hatched in pen, layered marks undulating into a wrinkled terrain. Two fish strung up post-catch. A seed pod vibrating with the energy of becoming. Gentle waters caressing the edge of a lake bank. Cacti potted and stacked. Birds soaring above an enfolding landscape. A detail of overlapping, entangling branches in the depths of a forest. A liquid graphite mountain-scape. A hare strung by the hind legs, a fallen victim of hunting pursuit. These images represent an ecology of drawings curated from The Kedumba Collection – a fragment of a larger, living network of Australian contemporary art practice.
A white house tucked between blossoming gardens and towering eucalypts, surrounded by the lush green spaces of the Blue Mountains Grammar School, quietly nurtures one of the most significant collections of Australian contemporary drawing. This unimposing, warmly inviting former homestead is The Kedumba Gallery, home to over 250 drawings acquired annually through the Kedumba Drawing Award. Established in 1990 by Jeffrey Plummer, the collection includes works from some of Australia’s most celebrated contemporary artists: Arthur and David Boyd, Judy Cassab, Nicholas Harding, Sidney Nolan, Margaret Olley, John Olsen and Lloyd Rees to name but a few. Carefully curated from this abundant archive, DRAWING ECOLOGIES – a collaboration between DRAW Space and The Kedumba Collection – investigates the nuances and complexities of humankind’s relationship with the natural world. Narratives of contemplation and connection, cultivation and consumption thread from one drawing to the next, weaving together to chronicle humanity’s interaction and interference with organic environments.
Our entanglement with the natural world is a fundamental aspect of being human; we are ourselves another critter in the cornucopia of life on Earth. We live within infinite networks of ecological webs, organisms perpetually affecting one another, a relational ebb and flow between one being and the next. Drawing is the original tool that helps us navigate these convoluted relationships. Drawing harnesses both the comprehension of and connection with a subject. The shared histories between humankind and drawing the natural environment can be traced back at least 30,000 years to European Paleolithic cave paintings depicting galloping horses, deer, lions, bears,
and bison.1 In Australia, a painting of a leaping kangaroo in a Kimberley rock shelter in Balangarra Country, regarded as the oldest known intact Aboriginal rock painting, has been dated at over 17,000 years.2
In the Western tradition, drawings of the natural world have evolved as perceptions of nature have also transformed. From prehistoric cave paintings to ancient murals, Medieval manuscripts to Renaissance nature studies and Enlightenment natural history illustrations, and Romantic landscapes to Modern impressionist and expressive interpretations that broke from the bounds of representational accuracy. Today, contemporary practitioners draw inspiration from this rich artistic lineage while emphasising new understandings of the natural world and our place within it. DRAWING ECOLOGIES explores humankind’s entanglement with nature and how drawing continues to provide a compass to help navigate this complex and fragile relationship.
Gadigal/Sydney-based artist Chris Casali examines interactions between the external world and the internal self in her process-driven creative practice. With a highly sensitive consideration of materiality, her work slips between representation and obscurity, allowing familiar images to emerge from ambiguous forms. Fragmented 2016 evokes a speculative landscape that playfully ricochets between recognisable patterns of tree lines and river deltas, sheer cliff faces and sloping hills before fracturing back into obscurity. Casali’s fluid yet detailed marks overlap like sediment awash in a rising tide, creating smooth planes of graphite contrasted with intricate textured surfaces. Fragmented challenges interpretations of scale, simultaneously an expansive landscape and an intimate study of an imagined organic artefact.
Maryanne Coutts employs drawing to help traverse the perpetual unravelling of time and the transient nature of lived experience. Her approach to drawing is diaristic, whereby drawing becomes an activity woven within the fabric of her daily life. Tree Drawing #3 2016 belongs to Coutts’ ongoing body of work 100 Trees, where the artist is developing 100 graphite portraits of trees encountered in her Sydney surroundings. The drawings evoke the shared presence between artist and subject, reflecting the transient intimacy of this singular moment of cohabitation and the broader relationship between humans and the natural environment. From gums, pines and palms to grevilleas, banksias, figs and cypress, 100 Trees delicately captures the textures of bark, bifurcating arbours, and the details of leaves, flowers and seed pods. In the series, negative spaces carve across the limbs of trees felled for urban development.
Based in Ngarigo/Monaro, NSW, landscape and still life artist Lucy Culliton celebrates the enchanting beauty of country Australia with taxonomically detailed yet expressive depictions of rural landscapes and cultivated gardens, animal portraits and arranged botanicals. Her practice is a vibrant ode to the richness of rural Australian culture, capturing the auburn afternoon light on a paddock tree line, to cascades of flowering lupines, irises or dahlias, to the charisma of a prize goat or rooster at Sydney’s Royal Easter Show. Cactus 1 2004 features a curated display of potted cacti; from nursery tags protruding from small plastic pots to paint cracking on the decorative wire shelving, the details allude to broader narratives of care and cultivation of more-than-human organisms.
Dharawal/Shoalhaven-based artist Anna Glynn’s multimedia practice is a highly sensitive and critical exploration of shared histories between humans and nature. She poetically exposes historical narratives of mythology, occupation and colonisation through drawing, painting, sculpture and audiovisual installation. Awaiting Discovery 2015 features as part of Glynn’s broader project, Promiscuous Provenance, commissioned by Shoalhaven Regional Gallery in 2018. The exhibition presents fantastical, lively worlds of vibrantly coloured Australian flora and fauna, paired with strange, monochromatic hybrid creatures – kangaroos donning colonial dress and swans transforming into sailing ships. Referencing 18th and 19th-century colonial paintings of Australian landscapes, Glynn re-interprets these curious and often inaccurate images, encouraging a re-examination of our settler past and highlighting nostalgia for native ecologies that thrived pre-European-colonisation.
Anne Judell’s approach to drawing is a durational and meditative investigation of materiality. Her drawings, often taking years to develop, emerge through the repetitive application of delicate layers of pastel, graphite, charcoal and gesso, marks slowly multiplying until familiar, organic forms appear through the fog of abstract formlessness. Examining Judell’s drawings is a process of peeling back individual layers of soft textures, calculating where the marks of one layer intersect with those above and below. Seed 2001 appears to represent enfolding leaves and budding petals within an ellipsis of light. The image evokes a deep sense of contemplation and catharsis, as if the drawing itself breathes slowly, in and out.
Based on Djaara Country, in Castlemaine, VIC, Leith Maguire investigates the intersection between human and natural environments through the lenses of common worlds theory and queer ecologies. For Maguire, drawing is a process of understanding their identity and connection with their surroundings, a means of tangling and untangling inner and outer realities. Loose layers of monochromatic ink wash and detailed lines are characteristic of Maguire’s unique practice, often depicting chimeric figures of human, plant and animal bodies. Gutted 2013 is a visceral depiction of two fish strung up post-catch; wet, limp bodies rendered in fluid ink and intricate marks. Wrenched from their marine habitat, scales still glistening, the fish reflect both the violence and fleshy intimacy of consumption.
Currently residing in Edinburgh, Martin Rek continues to draw inspiration from the unique vegetation of lutruwita/Tasmania, where he spent ten years living and working. His atmospheric landscapes created in rich carbon pencil capture nuances of the Tasmanian wilderness, from the course textures of subalpine flora, to sheets of encroaching mist, to glittering reflections on a lake surface. Solitude in the Arthurs 2020 depicts the tranquil Lake Signus in Tasmania’s Southwest National Park, with calm waters gently embracing the pebbly shore. Rek’s large-scale, hyperrealistic landscape transports us to a seemingly untouched wilderness, a portal to Tasmania’s endemic ecological havens.
Drawer and painter Mike Riley displays a unique approach to drawing the landscape – playful and expressive, detailed in the delicate marks from pen and pencil. The aerial perspective of the dry Macleay riverbed in First Rain on the Macleay 2011 undulates, folding in on itself. The surface appears to swell, like a river surging after a heavy downpour. Birds soar above as the impending storm encircles the land, embracing the dry with the promise of new life. Riley reflects the tumultuous relationship between drought and flood that defines much of rural Australia.
Living and working on Wiradjuri land, central NSW, Luke Sciberras explores relationships between natural environments and their human occupants through expressive gestures and enticing colour palettes. For Sciberras, a landscape is an impression of the human condition, a quiet investigation into the knotted lives of the land’s inhabitants. Hare 2004 pays homage to the 17th and 18th-century European still-life genre of hunting trophies. The unfortunate hare is often represented with legs tied, strung above the head in ceremonial defeat. Sciberras’ hare appropriates this pose yet imbues the animal with the dynamism of wet ink – creating a liquid vitality juxtaposed against the creature’s lifeless posture.
Based in Naarm/Melbourne, Adriane Strampp examines the nuances of memory and personal experience, developing landscapes and interiors that are infused with both private sentiment and communal familiarity. Her paintings play with soft, atmospheric light, creating a slippery push and pull between the subject and its shadow. In some of her earlier works on paper, Strampp developed drawings of characteristically cautious animals, including horses, hares, and stags. Hare (in memory of Marcus) 2010 has been expertly rendered in charcoal, each strand of fur etched with precision to form a dense black coat. Like Sciberras’ hare, Strampp’s drawing speaks to the historical legacy of the subject, notably Albrecht Durer’s famed Young Hare 1502.
Claire Tozer draws inspiration from the coastal environments of her hometown on Darkinjung Country, Central Coast NSW, and from her travels through outback Australia. She uses intricate, repetitive mark-making to relive a sense of immersion in nature. Employing fine, graphic lines of ink pen, Tozer’s landscapes expertly capture complicated interactions between positive and negative space, as twisted lines like branches or blades of grass transect dense layers of hatching. Remnants 2019 depicts a vast open landscape where, like Riley’s drawing, perspective appears to bend and shift. Throughout her methodical drawing process, Tozer changes angles and directions, creating a tapestry of surfaces undulating in dense layers of ink.
Wendy Tsai investigates the vast bushland and rainforests of the Blue Mountains National Park, where she resides on Gundungurra Country, Katoomba, NSW. For Tsai, drawing is a method of being present within a landscape, a mnemonic device that recalls the embodied experience of being in place. Acknowledging the devastating impact of human interference on the natural world, Tsai embeds a sense of disquiet within layers of marks so soft they appear ephemeral, as though the scenery could vanish in an exhaled breath. The Gully Winter #2 2015 presents a thickly forested area, dense with overlapping twigs and branches that recede into a dark expanse. Captivating in its quietness, Tsai’s drawing is a deeply sensitive exploration of fragile ecosystems and our place within them.
DRAWING ECOLOGIES is a quietly thoughtful examination of drawing as a method of contemplating and connecting with the natural world. DRAW Space is honoured to collaborate with The Kedumba Collection to present this survey of representations of nature from their unique and celebrated archive of Australian contemporary drawing. Hares, fish, kangaroos and country plains, forest depths and weeping willows, riverbeds and deltas and liminal lake edges, cacti, quolls and peeling petals – these images are but a branch, a root, a tendril of the broader ecology of drawings in The Kedumba Collection.
© Eva Nolan, 2025
1 David Attenborough, “Picturing the Natural World,” In Amazing Rare Things, edited by David Attenborough, Susan Owens, Martin Clayton and Rea Alexandratos. (New Haven: Yale, 2015): 9.
2. Damien Finch et al., “Australia’s Oldest Known Aboriginal Rock Paintings,” Pursuit, February 23, 2021, https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/australia-s-oldest-known-aboriginal-rock-paintings
Download a pdf copy of the Curatorial Essay here.
Opening Night, 6-8pm Thursday 9 January 2025
Images by Lisa Ho and Jeremy Smith
