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The magazine will feature exclusive interviews with artists, scientists, writers and creative thinkers.

Between the human body and the inner self

Valeriya N-Georg is an artist inspired from Neuroscience, Psychology and Consciousness studies, who works with a range of media: drawing, printmaking, mixed media and sculpture.

“My principal interest is Neuroscience, as a system of exploring the relationship between the human body and the embodied self. I use fragments of physical anatomy to visually represent the inexpressible experience of inhabiting a body; the boundaries between the inner and outer self; between the physical and metaphysical; tangible and intangible, the tactile and the optical.”

A vocabulary of patterns

Giulia Ricci’s finely detailed geometrical works use a variety of processes, hand-made and digital drawing, laser engraving, installation and video. Drawing underpins the artist’s practice across the various media. Drawing is a means of translating the experience of tactility into a visual image, as the artist creates a sense of texture through the use of a non-representational visual language.

Drawing, language and thinking

Ana Mendes is a writer and visual artist, creating projects in which she uses photography, video, drawing, text and installation to address issues of memory, language and identity. She has been the recipient of several awards for her works in performance, video, photography and literature, including the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2017, second prize winner, London, UK. Her research project, ‘On Drawing’, aims at establishing a connection between drawing and thinking in the realms of arts and science.

The Language of Line

“The entry point to my mark making lies in my everyday experience. These marks I interpret as imaginary traces that reflect the fragility of both human and environmental interconnectedness. Although I constantly see traces around me, the experience of absorbing these traces is not so much a visual experience as it is a physical process. Seeing is more a cyclical slippage between the reception of absorbing external traces and the inner resonance I feel inside my body.”

Formally a cardiac nurse, artist Sonya Rademeyer uses the vehicle of sound, movement and deep listening to explore the sensing of traces in her everyday experiences and the fragility of line to capture and translate them into form.

Between drawing and writing

Kelly Chorpening is an artist, writer and educator. She has been the Course Leader for BA (Hons) Drawing at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL since 2006. Her recent experiments explore ways of materialising the form of language in order to test the fundamental processes of naming and identification that occur in both drawing and writing. She is currently co-editing, with Rebecca Fortnum, ‘A Companion to Contemporary Drawing’, containing newly commissioned essays on contemporary drawing, to be published in 2018.

A perspective on drawing

Richard Talbot is currently Head of Fine Art and Professor of Contemporary Drawing at Newcastle University. His work includes large-scale drawings, sculpture, and more recently, video/installation. His research and studio practice is centred on contemporary drawing, but he brings to this a particular interest in the theory, history and practice of perspective. His interest in drawing, and in particular his use of perspective, has developed out of originally making sculpture and finding that drawing and the investigation of line, plane and space, lay at the root of much of his theoretical and creative concerns. This in turn has led to an investigation into many areas of drawing practice – but in particular, the role that linear perspective plays in that practice.

Mediating between Nature and Self

Tania Kovats is renowned for producing sculptures, large-scale installations and temporal works which explore our experience and understanding of landscape. Her work was the subject of a major solo exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh in 2014, encompassing sculptures and drawings which explored her preoccupation with the sea. She is Course Director, MA Drawing at UAL, Wimbledon and has recently been appointed Professor of Drawing at Bath Spa University. She is also the author of ‘Drawing Water’ (2014) and ‘The Drawing Book: A Survey of Drawing – The Primary Means of Expression’ (2017).

Reminders of a past

“The main focus of my work is the exploration of manmade forms, many of which have been gradually superseded, forgotten or abandoned. They were at the forefront of technology for their time but technology and purpose have left some of these structures behind and they have become architectural metaphors or reminders of a past. The work also looks at the idea of permanence and impermanence.”

Ian Chamberlain is a Senior Lecturer in MA Printmaking and Drawing and Print at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His work takes its influence from man-made structures. Reinterpreting them as monuments placed within the landscape, these objects in turn become landmarks of their time.

Material repetition

“I am looking at materiality and repeatedly putting it through the same process, so repetition is a key aspect of my vocabulary. By repeatedly putting something through the same process – or by repeating something and putting it in a different context – it becomes all too apparent that things can’t be repeated, that each one is totally unique and never the same.”

Lucinda Burgess’s background in painting, landscape design and oriental philosophy has led to a fascination with the raw elemental qualities of materials and inform a sculptural practice that accentuates the reality of constant change, undermining the idea of a fixed thing, object, entity or identity.

Random precision. Countless intimate acts.

Helen Pynor is an Australian visual artist who works at the intersection between art and the life sciences. She has degrees in both cell and molecular biology, and the visual arts, and holds a cross-disciplinary PhD from the Sydney College of Arts. She works with photography, video, sculpture and performance to explore ideas surrounding human and animal bodies, and disease. In this exclusive interview she discusses her collaborative project with Dr Iris Salecker at the Francis Crick Institute, London