Summer School

At our invitation, artist Tania Kovats will lead the week’s workshops with guest workshops led Marcus Coates and Sarah Woodfine.

Taking inspiration from our current exhibition Modern Nature (until 7 July) participants will explore ideas around ‘Personal Ecologies' and how this intersects with sociopolitical environmental ecologies, through a range of drawing processes and concepts.  As well as practical working space in the gallery, participants will have access to the unique resources of Outset Study for reference and research.

The Summer School is open to all, and is particularly suitable for those currently studying art or recently graduated, practicing artists and arts educators looking for new challenges, peer mentoring and critique. The workshops are suitable for all ages 17 upwards.

Tania Kovats is Professor of Drawing at Bath Spa University since 2018 and previously ran the MA Drawing at University of the Arts, London. Kovats’ work explores how culture negotiates how we connect to the natural world. Her practice embraces sculpture, drawing and writing, often working in the public realm. Kovats explores the psychological and poetic, to explore critical environmental and socio-political questions.

Kovats’ has exhibited widely and increasingly is preoccupied with environmental issues; her Dirty Water publication came out of her residency on the River Thames; Bleached presented her sculptural response to coral bleaching; she held a Fellowship at Exeter University, as part of the launch of the Global System Institute; this year she was in New Zealand as part of a Drawing Ecologies research project. She is author of The Drawing Book, published by Black Dog and Drawing Water published by Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh to accompany her solo exhibition there in 2014. 

Marcus Coates is a visual artist who works with various media, including performance, sculpture, video and sound. He is best known for his performative films, which explore encounters between the human and animal worlds. A keen ornithologist and naturalist, Coates’ interest in ‘getting back to nature’ sees him appropriating the language and behaviour of animals as a way to make sense of the emotional and social conventions that exist in the human world.

Sarah Woodfine is an artist, educator and curator who lives and works in both London and the Isle of Portland in Dorset. She is currently Course Leader for BA Sculpture at Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts London. She has taught and undertaken residencies internationally including Emily Carr University, Vancouver and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Woodfine has an interdisciplinary practice that is rooted in the process of drawing in its expanded form. Engagement with the material nature of drawing is explored three dimensionally into sculptural form, asking questions about the nature of materiality in relation to perception. At times Woodfine works collaboratively with groups and communities, utilizing drawing as a starting point to interrogate personal narratives, histories and folklore myths through her relationship with these subjects. She is currently working on a commission researching and reinterpreting specific stone works within the Tout Sculpture Quarry Park, Portland Dorset.

Full price £350

Drawing Room Network Members £300

Places are limited, book now. Any enquiries can be sent to [email protected]