Exhibition Drawing Room Invites… Anna Paterson, Alicia Reyes McNamara, Amba Sayal-Bennett 15 May 2025 – 27 July 2025 Back Alicia Reyes McNamara Location Gallery Images Quadrat, 2024, oil on paper, 102 x 68 cm, courtesy the artist Alicia Reyes McNamaraTaste of Dirt, 2022, pastel on paper, 21 x 29.7 cm, courtesy the artist Amba Sayal-BennettCurb, 2020, ink, pro-marker and graphite on paper, 21cm x 29.7cm, courtesy the artist Drawing Room Invites… exhibits solo presentations from three artists who contributed to Drawing Biennial 2024, giving greater insight into their practices and the innovative art being made within the expanded field of drawing today. These artists were co-selected by our team and the local community and this will be the first show in a public gallery for each artist. Anna Paterson explores experimental processes of image-making on paper, incorporating techniques associated with printmaking, domestic cleaning and painting. She works intuitively, smearing tacky, coated paper with oiled rags before scrubbing and abrading the surface, adding punctures, marks and rubbed textures with a variety of tools and objects to create abstract forms. Discoloured and translucent, these works are reminiscent of clouded shed windows, yellowed wallpaper and pitted Tube tunnel walls, together forming a diaristic archive of snapshots that ponder how the elements of our urban environment are layered and degraded by natural processes over time. Alicia Reyes McNamara’s mutating and shapeshifting beings in fantastical landscapes are part of a queering of religious rituals and indigenous folklore, informed by her Mexican and Irish ancestry. Realised in popping coloured pastels on small and large scales, her recent works are informed by Catholic devotional imagery, specifically the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa and the Temptation of Saint Anthony. Blurring the boundaries between the sacred and the earthly, these works are exuberant, expansive interpretations of these traditional subjects, part of the artist’s personal exploration of the spiritual and the ecstatic through the intimate medium of drawing. Amba Sayal-Bennett traces forms, bodies and knowledge across different sites following a migratory logic. Informed by architecture and medicine, she works with computer-aided design software to create digital drawings of decontextualised body parts, which are transformed into smoothly intricate three-dimensional objects in cool, neutral tones. Translating visceral human physicality into something clean and machine-like, these cut-away, layered works are informed by Western histories of medicine, of controlling and containing the body through schematised illustrations, in contrast to the more holistic and metaphysical ways of understanding the body passed down by the artist’s South Asian forebears.