Group Show / IN PARALLEL
DRAW Space are delighted to present Group Show / IN PARALLEL
6pm Thursday 31 October to 5pm Sunday 24 November
This exhibition of board members and volunteers at DRAW Space celebrates the collective effort to establish and run this new artist-run initiative. It honours the commitment of those involved and highlights the shared vision that drives our work. By bringing together diverse practices, the show reflects not only individual creativity but also the spirit of collaboration that defines DRAW Space.
At DRAW Space, we embrace a broad understanding of drawing, encouraging exploration and research into its evolving forms. This exhibition gathers works that celebrate the varied possibilities of drawing, demonstrating how it crosses boundaries of technique and form.
As we mark a year and a half of continuous programming, this exhibition reaffirms our commitment to supporting diverse voices. Through our exhibitions, workshops, and residencies, we aim to raise the profile of drawing in Australia and internationally, creating space for new conversations.
Join the DRAW Space Board and Volunteer team to celebrate from 6pm on Thursday 31 October. The exhibition will run to 5 pm on Sunday 24 November.
Group Show / IN PARALLEL features the work of:
Board members: Artemisia Cornett, James Gardiner, Melinda Hunt, Chelsea Lehmann, Eva Nolan, Lisa Pang, Daniel Press, Jeremy Smith, Amanda Solomons, Luke Thurgate, Gary Warner and Belinda Yee.
Volunteers: Monika Cvitanovic, Sarah Eddowes, Tempe Macgowan, Jayne Madden, Judith Macrae, Declan Moore, Sarah Serfati, Maria Phillips, Katika Schultz, Richard Trang and Beatrice Weidner.
Artist Statements
Artemisia Cornett
The etymological root of Illustration is the latin, illustrationem, meaning a vivid, enlightening representation. Artemisia Cornett's drawing practice adopts the aesthetics of children's book illustration to render immersive, dream-like suggestions of narrative, inviting the audience to engage in reparative storytelling through interpretation. Within intricate animal allegory, Artemisia draws parallels to universal experiences of fear, shame and longing that underpin the escapist desire innate to fictional storytelling and the Arcadian ideal. ... I can only look up now is a meditation on the death impulse and the transference of pain from the sufferer to those who are left to grieve the loss.
Monika Cvitanovic
Monika Cvitanovic practices a slow approach to materiality, memory and layers of histories embedded in quotidian objects. Her current project reclaims textiles as a site of care for her familial and cultural histories of textile-based knowledge and aims for sustainability in relationship to the future. Asserting a slow and circular approach to making through repetitive free-form stitching, the project rejects neoliberal and patriarchal expectations of production and consumption. In 2021 Monika completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours Class 1), at UNSW Art & Design, Sydney, where she is currently a PhD candidate.
Sarah Eddowes
Pixel Art is part of an ongoing exploration of the extrusion of pliable material. Extrusion comprises a "soft party" and a "hard party". The soft material is forced into a certain shape or path by the rigid structure of the mesh. Sarah Eddowes' practice explores the tactile experience of the body in the physical world and how this translates to digital spaces. Sarah Eddowes is an inter-disciplinary artist and PhD Candidate at UNSW. Her current practice-based PhD research explores the connections between materiality in digital and physical space. Her experimental practice incorporates sculpture, stop motion and 3D animation, digital fabrication, photogrammetry, and virtual reality.
James Gardiner (fahn)
While working on a series of floor drawings, James Gardiner realised a form of performance was taking place. His yoga had transformed – fluidly moving from one spot to another, picking up a brush with his left while holding himself up with the right, moving from a crouch to jump, skulking around and around the artwork, searching for the next mark. This is a performance of utility, a curious dance developed in response to reaching, circling, focusing and scribing. Working on the floor for Gardiner has been a revelation, changing the physiology of his art-making, involving every part of the body, shifting his perspective, strategy and relationship with the work. These artworks are a testament to a strange dance, shared with an audience over two hours on 29 July 2024 at DRAW Space.
Melinda Hunt
Living and working on Gadigal Land in Sydney’s Inner West, Hunt’s drawing practice is an exploration of forms of thinking, feeling and knowing. She draws while walking as a distinctive strategy that brings perception and visualisation to the forefront. Her drawings, therefore, are not about things or places or herself but about the relational space between them and the energy created in the interstitial. Maps of Being, I, II and III were made while walking through wasteland between the railway line and the old station building in Newtown, accessed when the artist found a gate unexpectedly and fortuitously left unlocked.
Chelsea Lehmann
In this series, Lehmann pays homage to the playful and sensuous qualities of Pompeii frescoes through her softly layered works titled Modern Love in Pompeii. These small studies explore the textures and colours characteristic of ancient frescoes, highlighting their representations of human intimacy and emotion.
Jayne Madden
Dancing with Tigers aims to uplift the viewer with a joyful escape from our often complex lives. Biomorphic characters are central in this work to symbolize the dynamic energy of nature. Their visual language implies a connection to the natural world. Curved flowing shapes that envelope the characters are used to evoke a sense of security, particularly so for the feminine forms. It allows them the freedom to be their intrinsic selves. Madden’s digital drawings are usually crowded with movement and shape to add a cheerful ambience. When creating this work the artist was envisaging dance and music and evoking her inner child. This work is also a celebration of the gender fluid in a society that is still unbalanced and skewed.
Tempe Macgowan
Tempe Macgowan’s artwork is focused on the process of making, the local and familiar, and mark-making. Her work is influenced by her former profession of Landscape Architecture/Urban Design. In this instance, Macgowan artist took over 200 photos on her iPhone in a South American city. Drawings were made from the photos on rice paper using graphite. This was followed by a process of reordering the drawings into a collage about the place; a second-hand process that allows the drawings to become a new representation of the place. A vocabulary of lines, marks and colours evolves and translates the place into a drawing. There is a tension between spatial and structured, formal, architectural representation and a more organic visual story-telling approach on the two-dimensional plane. This technique of line and mark-making is based on resisting decades of ingrained technical drafting and representation.
Judith Macrae
Drawings – These studies are an investigation of the seed pods of the coastal banksia (Banksia integrifolia). They reflect the artist’s interest in nature and, in particular, her fascination with the woody, sculptural forms of the seed pods.
Sculpture – My Little Bunny is a reflection of my love of animals, and the playfulness and joy they can bring to the world. The sculpture has been created using sustainable, recycled materials and without the use of glues or other chemicals. The figure has been brought to life with a skin of precious salvaged fabrics and the surface has been animated through wrapping and stitching using natural yarns and threads.
Eva Nolan
Eva Nolan explores drawing as a way of thinking through multispecies relationships during the current biodiversity crisis and mass extinction event. She appropriates Western colonial traditions of scientific illustration whereby species were rendered with taxonomic precision and positioned as independent objects removed from their environmental contexts. Nolan combines empirical techniques of intricate, detailed mark-making with speculative, complex compositions and gestural traces. Her drawings explore contemporary understandings of multispecies entanglements and ecological fragility, literally and conceptually drawing species together in webs of interconnection.
Lisa Pang
This sakiori (rag) weaving was made on a backstrap loom while I was living between Australia and Japan. The primitive form of loom was a liberating way of working as my studio could be rolled up to travel with me. All that is required is the tension of my body and something solid to attach to, whatever the season or place. Weaving is drawing by grid. The (vertical) warps are persimmon-dyed silk thread gifted by my teacher from hand-reared silkworms and the (horizontal) warps are a mixture of silk and cotton strips in various colours and patterns, torn from kimono and futon fabric scraps. Domestic utensils are incorporated so that the final piece is a hybrid assemblage. Incorporating domestic objects – a bobbin and a broom – allows me to narrate that sense of strangeness and non-belonging that accompanies movement between different places, skills, art and craft.
Maria Phillips
Phillips’ work explores the realm of the supernatural and abstract, with a focus on emotional well-being. She makes art with a mental health perspective mind. The inspirations for the work are galactic themes, the vibrant colours of spring and surrealism. Phillips has been influenced by abstract modern art.
Daniel Press and Sarah Eddowes
Thinker is a collaborative sculpture by Daniel Press and Sarah Eddowes for their Exquisite Corpse series. The waxy form was made from 3D scans of ornaments at the University of Sydney Quadrangle; taken from the Board Room that featured many contemplative heads. In their collaboration, the artists explored the slippage between visceral physical materials and digital fabrication. Their shared sculptural language enabled an interplay from artist to artist and machine to machine, morphing into goops of surrealist fun.
Katika Schultz
Katika Schultz’s work explores the interplay between psychology, materiality, and process. Using found objects coated in sticky ink, Schultz repeatedly passes them through a printing press, each time removing more ink with paper. This process reveals the object’s texture and details. Through hand-cut stencils and monoprints, the artist explores how overlapping marks and ghost prints form relationships — each repetition leaving traces of what once was. Found Object Monoprint #1 & #2 reflect a duality, presenting two identical shapes with distinct textures, evoking ambivalence and states of mind. Forecast represents a veil of weather, rotating on the paper’s surface.
Sarah Serfati
Metal documents textures of the metropolis, observing and layering artificial light and sound captured during a dérive across Sydney CBD. Accompanied by sound manipulated from on-site recordings and reduced samples, Metal reflects on the stimulation of the urban environment and its electric pulses, noise, streams, and networks as they bounce against architectural surfaces. Documenting these flat surfaces through video augments the dromology of the urban environment; redirecting the viewers’ focus on static and cold structures such as columns, handrails and electrical boxes. This reduction deceives the city as a centre for capital and activates the facade of the metropolis as a lens through which to gaze. In effect, the teaming buzz of the cityscape at night reveals itself in an abundance of ephemeral abstraction, music, artifice, and beauty.
Jeremy Smith
The term Zeitgeist is German for spirit of the age. In this artwork, I aimed to capture the essence of our modern world, especially in relation to the ongoing climate change crisis. I found that the tragedy and lessons of the Titanic encapsulate our current collective zeitgeist. Using floor plans of the Titanic I map metaphorical parallels between three main features of the ship with our zeitgeist. 1, The technological hubris, disregard for nature, and capitalism. 2, The inbuilt inequality and social class hierarchy, and 3, the lifeboats as a metaphor for salvation. I imagine what ideas and themes the lifeboats represent in our world today – what could save us from the impending doom of climate change? I propose the following words on the lifeboats: Science, renewables, reason, technology, equality, "know thyself", knowledge, and kindness. I hope when people view this artwork they will be stirred to action to prevent this unfolding tragedy.
Amanda Solomons
Through labour-intensive etching and drawing techniques, Amanda Solomons manipulates perceptions of time, creating pieces that embody both movement and flux. Viewed from a distance, her work can appear abstract or frenetic. Upon closer inspection, each small mark is revealed. This interplay between chaos and precision invites the viewers to sit with the unpredictability and ambiguity of our evolving world. Her work explores the constant nature of change, its ephemeral nature yet how it scatters physical detritus. Each stroke is guided by observations of the influence of human behaviour and its ripple effects, such as migration patterns and decolonisation. She is fascinated by environmental shifts - evolving terrains, heat maps, and signs of decay.
Luke Thurgate
Based on Francisco de Goya's 18th-century painting, ‘Witches' Flight', this drawing reimagines the scene through a queer lens. Writhing figures replace his pagan protagonists, playing out tensions between desire and restraint, menace and pathos, hiding and revealing. For as long as Thurgate can remember he has had an enduring fascination with Goya’s late work, in particular his grotesque cast of giants, devils, gods, and monsters. The ambiguous emotional register of his ‘Pinturas negras’ or ‘Black paintings’ continues to inspire his studio practice.
Richard Trang
Endurance, 2024, is a photographic series. In creating this body of work, Trang has revisited his childhood house nearly a decade on. He is unsure what has transpired in the space since but here, light reveals the burden of time. Rooms, furniture, appliances, and household items appear undisturbed. These scenes are diorama-like, not dead, but fossilised. Re-imagining them again through his analogue camera, the artist freezes time again and gives them a new life. Light seeps through the lens into these black and white 35mm frames, re-enduring their burden of time.
Gary Warner
Gary Warner is an artist, writer, and curator who uses diverse media to create encounters with abstraction. He teaches expanded drawing at the National Art School, is a member of the modular synthesis trio Chordata and the audio-visual trio Ochromosonico, and is the host and composer of the Sonic Sketchbooks podcast.
Beatrice Weidner
Beatrice Weidner works with drawing, watercolour and mono-printing techniques. She focuses on the dynamics in current natural ecologies. The emphasis is on the interplay of ecological base elements, such as particles suspended in liquid, which are the building blocks of all organic systems. The work considers the resorption of ecologies into these base elements and their re-manifestation from this primordial matrix in an ongoing cycle of destruction and recreation. The creative process driving the work embeds these natural occurrences through the chance-based autonomy of the materials and how Weidner’s perceptions of the world guide her water-based colour techniques.
Belinda Yee
Sandstone holds time – as material culture it bears witness to our histories. In Sydney escarpments and caves, sandstone cradles ceremonial carvings by First Nations people. While sandstone architecture, monuments, and universities are a constant reminder of our fraught colonial past. But sandstone also speaks to the present, whispering across the 250 million years of its formation from ancient riverbeds, it frames every view, demarcates the water's edge and provides shelter still. Yee thinks of this work as a singular note, a soft amorphous form offering a moment of contemplation that bends time inward, where what is solid becomes suggestion, and what is past folds into now.