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Drawing Room/Tannery Arts Unit 1b, New Tannery Way 58 Grange Road Bermondsey London, SE1 5WS
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Free and open to all, our Library is a unique collection of around 4,000 books dedicated to the exploration of contemporary drawing.
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Buy publications related to our exhibitions, as well as unique artworks and limited editions.
Find out more about Drawing Room, what we do, and our relationship with studio provider Tannery Arts.
Tannery Arts is a small, independent charity concerned with supporting the professional development of emerging and established artists through the provision of affordable studios, promoting their practice through opportunities to exhibit work, develop projects, generate partnerships with local authorities, private property owners and social housing organisations as well as engage in learning activities.
£30
I like Sharpies for their intense blackness and sharp points when they are new, for how the paper absorbs their ink, and for how they become mushy and fade with extended use – allowing for a great richness in gray tone and variation of line. For years, I used them only for writing telephone notes, the occasional doodle and for cartoons. Then in 2003 I was hiking in Iceland, and I came back to my small Manhattan apartment with an intense physical sensation of having crossed vast territories and the desperate need to hold on to this feeling a bit longer, representing it in as carnal a way as possible. I started drawing from the memory in my legs, mimicking on large paper with my hand the resistance that gravity had held on my body while crossing the flow of the glacial rivers and lava. This all recreated the sensation of being wonderfully naïve and lost in a foreign landscape, combined with the challenge of having to navigate with only a few known coordinates and the joy of accomplishment when arriving at some sort of personal end, like an early explorer. A decorative border and a completely arbitrary reference to ‘scale’ produced the first ‘map’. The joke was on the pointlessness of an operation that takes place in a fully surveilled planet, in an era of GPS boredom, and the redundancy of geographical curiosity or any exploration at all. This book is a partial document, in honor of the Sharpie as the marker of my time and of drawing, as simply the trace of a frail act of performance, of both being lost and of finding one’s way.
Aleksandra Mir, 2006
Artist: Aleksandra Mir Publisher: Onestar Press, Paris Format: Paperback Pages: 150 Illustrations: colour, b&w illustrations Dimensions: 14 x 22.5 cm Publication Date: 2006 Limited Edition of 250 numbered copies