Supporting access to the arts and sharing the love
Drawing is a RAW and fundamental activity.
Long before we learn to write we draw, often for the sheer love of making marks on paper. Yet, despite this essentiality, the pursuit of drawing for its own sake is all too often seen as an exclusive activity and deemed unreachable by most.
The scoring, boxing up and labelling of creative potential starts at an early age. At some point in childhood, a judgement is cast—often by our own volition—rigidly demarcating those that can draw and those that supposedly can’t.
How did we ever get to think like this?
Creativity is neither a static nor rigid entity, it is a continuum; a flow that never stops, and it lives within all of us, waiting to be discovered and re-ignited.
It is time to shake up these tired notions. Light the fire and see what happens. The more you work the line, the more you learn. Drawing is a practice. All you need is a surface to make a mark and, of course, a bold heart.
Observation and reflection, accident and serendipity, wild and controlled, imagination and the unimaginable, it all pours out onto the drawing surface once you begin.
It starts with a line.
dRAWing Space was set up to help everyone find their unique creative voice. Working with like-minded creative organisations and individuals seeking to increase access to the arts, dRAWing Space offers live drawing sessions and events at cultural venues across the South West region. Many events are collaborations, bringing together artists from different art forms to open up and extend the practice of drawing.
Sarah Chapman, f
ounder of dRAWing Space
I love drawing.
It is as simple as that. I see drawing as fundamental to creativity and believe drawing should feel as natural as it does to speak and write. However, during my twenty plus years of working in an arts education environment I came to realise that we have created structures that too often limit, not expand, the realm of creativity.
I set up dRAWing Space to change the way we think about drawing and to make drawing more accessible to more people.
From 2010-2021, I directed The Arts Institute at the University of Plymouth, where I worked with an amazing array of international, national and local artists, including: John Akomfrah, Phyllida Barlow, David Batchelor, Anthony Caro, Vija Celmins, Edgar Cleijne, Angela Cockayne, Michael Craig-Martin, Mary Evans, Ellen Gallagher, Douglas Gordon, Anthony Gormley, Peter Greenaway, Philip Hoare, Nadav Kander, Anish Kapoor, William Kentridge, Serena Korda, Tanya Kovats, Richard Hamilton, Lubaina Himid, Thurston Moore, Rosalind Nashashibi, Audrey Niffenegger, Ben Okri, Lucy and Jorge Orta, Tony Oursler, Peter Randall-Page, Will Self, Lemn Sissay, Yinka Shonibare, Bob and Roberta Smith, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gavin Turk, Phoebe Unwin, Richard Wentworth, to name a few....
With an interest in bringing together different disciplines to fire up new conversations, I have curated various cultural iniatives, including a range of regional and national festivals across art, music, film and literature, alongside working with the ‘big’ stars, curating exhibitions with The Royal Academy, Arts Council National Collection and Art Angel, London and co-curating international projects such as the Moby-Dick Big Read and the Ancient Mariner Big Read. I am equally committed to creating new pathways for artists at an earlier stage in their career and launched The Plymouth Contemporary and Plymouth Young Contemporary, and was one of the founding directors of Plymouth Visual Arts Consortium, becoming Chair of Visual Arts Plymouth (VAP) and launching the Plymouth Art Weekender from 2015-2018.
More recently, as I have sought to open up drawing and creative practice to new audiences, I have worked with various homelessness agencies and community based social enterprises, providing drawing workshops that help guide people to find their unique creative voice.
I am an alumni of the Royal Drawing School, and my current art practice is mostly concerned with line and the nature of obsession, often exploring the same object over and over until I get to its very core. Various ongoing obsessions (in no particular order) include rocks, trees, bodies of water and Dartmoor.