drawing on the outside

early on in the planning of this project, we discussed taking the workshops to where the people are. we tried this at the church, and this garnered interest, but no new participants at our sessions.

since last i wrote, we have taken our selves and materials to the bitterne men’s shed – a thriving community of men, mostly older, who were very busy with their own carpentry activity. some showed tentative interest in coming along to one of our sessions another day, and we were also invited back for when they have their art shed up and running. a couple of men did some drawing – the usual story of last drawing when at school – and were pleased with the results.

last saturday, we held a workshop at october books, to accompany the exhibition of work that is currently on show there. it is just a mile or two from our usual stomping ground, and three of our regular drawers attended – as did 6 other men (one from the bitterne men’s shed) who were keen to find out about the project, and who have shown active interest in coming along to the next workshops. time will tell.

following feedback from the regulars (as they will now be known), i decided to run a  more structured session – not timetabled to the minute (anyone who knows me will tell you that is not my style …), but instead, i did include the option of taking part in a directed activity – the results of which contributed to a group outcome. everyone who came along took up the offer, even though other, more freeform, options were available.

this project was partly conceived in response to the ‘one man, one bench’ phenomenon that i observed during lockdown and beyond, and it was interesting to me that as the men arrived and started their drawings, they sat at ‘one man, one table’. i quite blatantly rearranged the tables in a circle to encourage a more sociable atmosphere – as the afternoon progressed, conversation bubbled quite comfortably. i wonder how that would have been had i not moved the tables … we will never know.

in answer to the question posed in the last post, the extended strategy – taking our workshops out to pre-existing groups – has not yet led to new attendees at our own sessions.

the last 2 we have held have been with brian (sic) and marvin (also a pseudonym) present for the whole session, and one of our older drawers, pedro (not his real name), popping in for a cup of tea and a biscuit, but not stopping to draw, on account of his ill-health. we have received some emails from social-prescribers and social workers (probably due to 600 flyers that went out with a southampton voluntary services mail-out), but again, this has not yet resulted in attendance at the sessions. on the one hand, it is easy to feel disheartened by this, but katie and i look at each other, and remind ourselves that this was never going to be an easy process. our choice of cohort is notoriously difficult to engage, which is why there is little provision. and the men who are now coming regularly and drawing with us are open in their appreciation of the opportunity, and revel in the experience.

all the more so, now that we have installed the first exhibition of the work that has been made in the first 7 workshops. we are sharing the work in a community space at ‘october books’ – a brilliant enterprise, october books is a local, radical, ethical ‘more than just a’ bookshop, owned and controlled by staff, members and customers.

as a community space, it is not a classic gallery, hosting multiple events, random furniture and extensive food and drink, so we needed a way to show the work that was appropriate and packed a punch in a chaotic environment. as objects, the drawings are variably sized, mostly on paper, and are not robust, so i had the idea to show them as digital renderings of themselves, collated onto a single banner that would wrap around the room.

we had a thoughtful and discursive afternoon with the drawers, deciding how to group and place the drawings. it took us the whole 3-hour session to lay all the drawings out, group them, edit them (keeping some back for a later show where we will have more space), and then for brian and marvin to place them into a taped out space the size and shape of the planned banner. for me, it was a great exercise in listening, enabling, encouraging, tongue-biting and navigating shared desires with different visions. it felt important that it was a genuinely collaborative process – that katie and i brought some experience and expertise to support the wishes of the people we had invited to be part of this endeavour.

then we spent a day on the computers …. thanks to simon griggs at solent university, and peter in the canon print shop there, for their experience and expertise. newest version photoshop made selecting the drawings and combining them less fiddly than i anticipated, although it was still an 11pm finish to be sure the file was ready for printing the next day.

the show looks great. brian, katie and i had a lot of fun making it work – magnets, pins, double-sided tape and determination were all required. and our morning was rewarded with a delicious lunch at the veg-out café: a community-run social enterprise, using food that would otherwise be wasted. what could be better?

a million other thoughts have been rolling around my head, and we have talked about some of them in the sessions.

these include:

– how does it affect the dynamic/ethos/validity that katie and i (women) are running a men’s drawing group?

– how can we encourage our participants to take some agency in how the group runs?

these will have to wait, so here are some prelim pics of the show – if you are based in southampton, or nearby, do join us for a free drawing workshop at october books on saturday february 25th from 1-4pm. this is for anyone and everyone – maybe a couple of our men will be there to talk about the project – maybe they won’t. either way, katie and i will be there with a beautiful exhibition to share with you, as well as a range of drawing materials and things to draw.

new year – new approach. alongside the sessions we run independently, we have planned some sessions over the next few months where we will ‘pop-up’ at pre-existing groups. our first one was at ‘thursday’s together’ at a local church.  this is a foodbank and social event every thursday, where local people can come and collect food, have free tea coffee and biscuits, and socialise in a warm building. it was established during covid, but has continued due to ongoing demand. yet another example of the time, resource and goodwill of others doing the work of the government. i could cry … but i won’t. instead, i will do what i can to balance need, desire, demand and outrage.

we were invited to introduce ourselves to the people who were amassing in the cafe area of the church. one of the great things that they do at ‘together thursdays’ is distribute wooden spoons with numbers on to visitors as they arrive. this way, those there for the foodbank get to sit and socialise pending the calling of their spoon number. this negates any need for queueing – offering a fair and safe way to access the service, that respects the dignity of those placed in this situation by the ever increasing gulf between the haves and have-nots in this country.

we stationed ourselves after the food – a stop-off point where we invited anyone who showed interest to sit with us and draw with us. we had several takers and distributed flyers for our men’s sessions. chris – a regular at ‘doto’ – was at the church, of his own volition, advocating for us, which was a lovely thing to experience.

we had a really enjoyable time – someone played the piano next to us for much of the 2 hours we were there, we had many conversations with people interested in joining us … just not today … and 3 men who did stop and draw with us headed off saying they would see us on the 25th, our next men’s workshop.

but what did it do for my practice? honestly, very little. yes, it made me think more deeply about how to approach recruitment for a socially-engaged project. it made me hopeful that this strategy was going to work and swell our workshop numbers. it allowed me to trial a way of teaching drawing using lights to cast shadows which were then drawn, and using this as a starting point to understand shape and form a bit more. but my drawing? i can’t think how it was nourished by this experience – i feel the need to rethink how i can artistically benefit from this process.

earlier in the month, katie and i met to review the first four sessions. we had some positive thoughts (we felt we were offering an enabling, welcoming environment, with a low-pressure structure allowing engagement on the men’s own terms and as a result, relationships are starting to develop) and continue to battle with some known challenges (numbers remain low – between 1 and 5 per session, and no-one has yet brought their own stimulus material to a session).

we concluded that we would continue to trust the process and each other. we have worked together many times now over a long period, as well as developing a friendship, and we are very aware that for a challenging project, trust is a necessary bedrock on which to take risks and push structures and ideas. acknowledging this explicitly builds on existing trust and enables open and frank exchange – it means we have both communication shortcuts within sessions, and honest long-form discussion between sessions. i feel lucky to have this working relationship as the basis for this project, but it does expose a bind that is often read as ‘cliquey-ness’ when working in the arts: repeatedly working with the same people is what enables this trust to evolve, but this can make the arts ecosystem (appear) impenetrable and exclusive. i think we have to be more aware and open and discursive about this if we are to address it successfully.

so, where are we going from here? we are going to try and increase our numbers of participants by taking our workshop to other established gatherings of people, both as an offering to existing groups, but also as a strategy to encourage others to attend our sessions. we will continue to run fortnightly sessions, with our own ones running monthly, and our partnered ones between these. we are also considering offering the option of taking part virtually through a zoom link, as it has become clear that travel (be it through cost, time, provision or weather) poses a barrier for some potential attendees. of course, the virtual offer exposes other access barriers.

we have also decided to NOT PHOTOGRAPH the sessions for the time being. i have been considering notions of ‘privacy’ and ‘instrumentalisation’, in terms of our relationship with non-human animals, for a while now, and the blasé way we image them during ‘private’ moments … i am thinking particularly about plans i had to put a web-cam in a sparrows’ nest in the walls of god’s house tower, and live-feed the images into the building as they nested and raised their young. it was a lot of brain gymnastics (helped by angie pepper’s great paper ‘glass panels and peepholes: nonhuman animals and the right to privacy’). this has made me look more critically at how we freely collect images of those we work with in socially-engaged projects – it is a given that funding bodies will expect ‘evidence’ and that images both still and moving will be collected. i was part of a project in the holyrood estate over the summer and was repeatedly jarred by a camera becoming apparent in the middle of activities in the quest for documentation. not only does this disrupt the activities taking place by making us think about being looked at, or being seen, but i also feel strongly that we are so used to being imaged that we no longer think about what that means, so is consent really given in an informed way?

anyway, we have noticed in our sessions that there has never been the right time to talk about photography and recording sessions in this way, as we are trying to stay right in the moment. so we are going to draw each other and photograph the work as a record instead. i would love to know other peoples’ thoughts around photography in the community, particularly in groups of people who we might consider vulnerable.

writing this for a second time (chrome crashed as i was finishing off a post on the night of the session), several days (and some disheartening experiences) later, it feels important to note how tone and memory can be so affected by current events. i will try and re-channel the positivity and forward-facing energies that katie and i shared the morning after session 4 when we met for a review of the project to date (see next post).

following a suggestion that we rejoice in southampton’s somewhat invisible, yet actual, proximity to the coast, katie collected some shells and driftwood from hengistbury last week. i also collected some large stones following another request from a participant that we paint them. one of our reflections was that the idea that those taking part collected and brought the things they were interested in drawing or using as inspiration had not taken off. (more of that later) so we continue to supply stimuli, based on comments and requests.

neither of the suggesters turned up. in fact, just one person did – and it was the same person that we had spent a lovely afternoon with in session 2. we all had a slightly awkward laugh about it – deciding that every other session was held just for this one man – and then we got on with having a great time.

having ascertained last session that people were quite happy with the free and easy nature of the sessions, i thought about my other intentions within this project – to challenge and develop my own practice – and decided to try some guided exercises to start the session this week. we drew shells from touch, doing  timed studies between 1 and 8 minutes long, using drawing materials that we would not usually go for. this yielded some beautiful marks that surprised all three of us. i chose to use charcoal from the church fire which gives an irregular, unpredictable mark. i found the process hard to focus on – how does time get so much slower when your eyes are closed? and hard to do – i usually work so quickly and immediately, so making these marks without assessing them as i went proved a challenge. but what emerged was a rich new set of marks which i went on to work with for some of the afternoon. despite some exciting outcomes from that beginning, we all settled back into known media and ways of drawing as the time passed.

last time it was just me, katie and one other, it felt quite difficult, but this time, large amounts of time were spent in a very comfortable, companionable silence as we each explored our drawing. brian (not his real name, but easier than repeating ‘a participant’) has been 3 times now, and it feels as though there is an ease developing between us. he is not a huge talker, and when he does talk, it is so quiet. but we have learnt to navigate this, encouraging and offering conversation whilst taking care not to demand it. drawing in a room together with someone who has chosen to come back feels like a gentle privilege.