Watermarks

Drawing Correspondence was founded in January 2021 by artists/educators Chloe Briggs, Tania Kovats and Anita Taylor as a response and contribution to a growing engagement with and sharing of drawing practice online. It is a structure that takes many forms and is designed to support participants at any stage of their practice in and through drawing. It is a way of forging connections and expanding a drawing community beyond institutions and physical space.

Many thanks to: Matthew Avignone, Gerry Davis and Jo Lewis.

Sarah Adams

Anne-Marie Atkinson

Agnes Becker

Barbara Cheney

Hanne Husa Dale

Ilona

Joanna Leah

Carrie Stanley

Rachel Welford

With a letter from:

Chloe Briggs

Tania Kovats

Anita Taylor

Dear Watermarks,

We have spent the last six weeks coming into confluence. Our separate bodies of water have connected through digital currents, and through drawing. This has been a complete immersion into what drawing can be when we go out of our depth. You have bravely drifted on unknown rip tides and currents that have carried you to new shorelines.

Water is life; there is no life without it.

Drawing has its own conversation with water: washes,drips, stains, dissolves, floods, saturation, bleeds, melts, evaporations - and watermarks. Drawing materials can be divided into wet or dry materials.

We invited you to come and play in the puddles. Perhaps this was about noticing what happens when you turn on the tap, fill a glass, or how your body is when you are in the bath. Simply noticing how water moves through our homes. Some of you wandered outside to see what happens when you sit by the river, the pond, the tide pool, the edge of the sea, and draw. Drawing forms attachment. The more you study, observe, and draw water the more likely you are to become a guardian of that water, the stream, river, saltmarsh, or rockpool. Water is part of your rituals from daily tasks of washing and mothering. Or dawn risings and baptising of your sheet of paper in the water. There is the water flowing in your imaginations, dreams and drawings; and nightmares with the fear of flood, storm and drought. All these things collected in the sediments and drying marks you made.

We invited you to visualise your life as a river, from source to mouth. A river that flows like a lifeline. You shared the streams and brooks that have flowed into and out of your life, the obstacles you flow around, your blockages and dams, and the larger bodies of water you are heading towards, telling your story as a river. Any river has its own voice and narrative flowing through it, carrying the stories of the territory it flows through.

As you invited water into your drawing you negotiated with what you understood of your agency in the drawing. Having to wait for a drawing to dry, not quite knowing what will happen if you freeze or flood this drawing.

Water makes us ask the question: are you the artist or are you the brush?

What flows through you as you draw? There is so much to learn from diving deep into water, not least that each act generates a ripple of consequence.

We invited you to engage with your liquid self. Our bodies are two thirds water. As is the body of our beautiful blue planet. Our lives and our seas have high tides and low tides. All these things leave Watermarks.

As your drawings have traced these marks left by water, we have gone beneath the surface together. It has been a joy to swim together.

Anita, Chloe and Tania