Drawing Difference: Connections Between Gender and Drawing (Drawing In) - Softcover

Drawing Difference radically reconfigures the terrain of discourse about drawing in fine art. It will be essential reading across disciplinary boundaries for all those concerned with the relations between art practices and their cultural context. Setting aside all dualisms and guided by the affinities between feminist thought and drawing in the contemporary fine arts, Meskimmon and Sawdon approach drawing from an elsewhere . Through explorations of a diverse array of drawings by contemporary artists they offer drawing as a threshold where the drawing performance, materialising embodied thinking, makes for otherness by embracing fluidity, openness, and dialogue. This is an exciting and adventurous text that challenges us to rethink the relations between sexed subjectivity and the practices of art-making. --Michael Phillipson, artist and writer, previously affiliated with Goldsmiths College (London) and Middlesex University

Drawing Difference: Connections Between Gender and Drawing offers a fresh perspective on contemporary drawing. In a thought provoking tour de force the authors draw on their highly respected expertise to explore the nexus between gender and drawing and to analyse the prominent role that women artists have played in the development of contemporary fine art drawing since the 1960s. By discussing pivotal works from the 1970s and their connections with contemporary practices they guide the reader through a cogently argued thesis that the conventions of contemporary fine art drawing and the key concerns of feminism are largely coextensive and hence that women working with drawing have shaped the conceptual parameters of the genre. Drawing difference is a welcome resource for researchers and practitioners alike. It makes a valuable contribution to the literature on drawing and is destined to become a standard work in its field. --Nancy Sever, Director, Nancy Sever Gallery, Canberra and formerly Director, Australian National University Drill Hall Gallery and Art Collection (1993 2012)

Drawing has been growing in recognition and stature within contemporary fine art since the mid-1970s. Simultaneously, feminist activism has been widespread, leading to the increased prominence of women artists, scholars, critics and curators and the wide acknowledgement of the crucial role played by gender and sexual difference in constituting the subject. Drawing Difference argues that these developments did not occur in parallel simply by coincidence. Rather, the intimate interplay between drawing and feminism is best characterised as allotropic a term originating in chemistry that describes a single pure element which nevertheless assumes varied physical structures, denoting the fundamental affinities which underlie apparently differing material forms. The book takes as its starting point three works from the 1970s by Annette Messager, Dorothea Rockburne and Carolee Schneeman, that are used to exemplify critical developments in feminist art history and key moments for drawing as a means of expression. Throughout the chapters, these works are further explored in relation to the contemporary drawing practices of Marco Maggi, Sian Bowen, Susan Hauptmann, Cornelia Parker, Christoph Fink and Toba Kheedori. Their works are shown to be (re)iterative sites where mark-making differs with each appearance yet retains certain essential features. Dividing its analysis into the themes Approaching, Tropes and Coinciding, the book analyses how both drawing and feminist discourse emphasise dialogue, matter and openness. It demonstrates how sexual difference, subjectivity and drawing are connected at an elemental level and thus how drawing has played a vital role in the articulation of the material and conceptual dynamics of feminism."