Drawing Research Forum 2024/25 Sessions – Part 1

The session will feature presentations and a plenary discussion with artists examining diverse themes, and utilising and developing current discourse around contemporary drawing.  The Drawing Research Forum provides a space for knowledge exchange between disciplines, encourages cross-fertilization of ideas and methodology, and fosters collaborations between artists and researchers.

Presentations include:

• Christie Swallow – Monuments to the Unknown Engineer
• Lindsay Sekulowicz – Drawing on Stone and Paper: Indigenous cosmovision in the Upper Rio Negro
• Yeonjoo Cho – Experimental Life Drawing: Beyond What We See

View full programme here

Christie Swallow – Christie is a spatial designer/researcher whose practice weaves together ecological thought and architectural design to discover intersecting epistemologies as spaces to reimagine ways of being and towards possible futures. Through their practice, Christie tells new stories about old ideas. Between a mythologized past and a precarious present, they seek to disentangle the webs of meaning that have shaped our contemporary attitude towards nature and towards other humans. Their work patches together new narratives from the scraps of a damaged world. Christie is currently Artist in Residence at SMQB, University of Birmingham. They have exhibited in London, Lisbon, and Leicester and were previously an artist in residence at Hangar CIA, Lisbon. Christie is a graduate of Environmental Architecture, Royal College of Art (2023), and Architecture, University of Cambridge (2020).

 Lindsay Sekulowicz – Born in 1984, Cape Town, I grew up and studied in at the Glasgow School of Art (2002-2006) and moved to London in 2007 to study at The Royal Drawing School. From 2013 to 2016 I worked with the University of Addis Ababa, which led to work with the herbarium at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. I began as artist in residence working on 19th century Amazonian ethnobotanical collections (residency funded by Arts Council England) in 2017, and had a solo show of this work at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery in Kew Gardens in the same year. In 2019 I began an AHRC-funded collaborative doctoral award between RBG, Kew and the University of Brighton. Since 2022 I have been undertaking research in Portugal (working with 18th century collections of drawings, herbarium, and ethnographic collections in Lisbon and Coimbra), as well as in Brazil, where I have been working with botanical and ethnographic collections in Rio de Janeiro, and undertaking fieldwork in the Upper Rio Negro region of the Northwest Amazon.

 Yeonjoo Cho – is a Korean artist and researcher based in Seoul, South Korea and Glasgow, United Kingdom. Centred on the tropes and ideas of ‘Oriental Painting’, her work explores the boundaries and intersections of cultures. Based on her background of oscillating between South Korea and the UK, her latest work showcased paintings and drawings which focus on experiences of move and migration and narratives of cultural others and hybrids.  Cho studied painting and art history at Ewha Womans University and completed her interdisciplinary PhD research which employs contemporary art practice, art history, and postcolonial discourses as three key columns. Her work has been exhibited in various cities in the UK and South Korea, including institutions such as the Scottish Royal Academy, Edinburgh City Art Centre, Cambridge University, Cheongju Creative Art Studio, Uijeongbu Art Centre, and SeMA-Buk Seoul Museum of Art.