Curated by David Dimbleby and Liza Dimbleby
5th October 2024 to 27th April 2025
“What do we do when a situation feels unspeakable? When our body is disturbed – unsettled by emotion, fraught with feeling, which cannot be put into words. When speech does not release the disturbance, but distorts or augments it, or when a mouth is blocked and words do not come at all. What does the mute body do then? There are other ways of signalling. We see before we speak, deciphering the first shapes of the faces that look at us – first light, first darkness. We start to read the world as shapes of light and dark. Alphabets were made from pictures, the shapes and visual metaphors of the experienced world. The shape-making language of drawing can tolerate ambivalence and conflicting impulses and may propose a resolution through the medium itself. Using the same tools with which spoken words become writing, we scratch at the surface with sticks or nibs, the point of a pencil, smearing the dust of charcoal or graphite, until something starts to happen, the drawing itself responding to the mood, the disturbance or question that began it.” Excerpt of text by Liza Dimbleby
A comprehensive exhibition showing hundreds of drawings including work by Ken Kiff, Louise Bourgeois, Madge Gill, Emma Talbot, Laura Footes, Tracey Emin, James Gillray, Ansel Krut, Barbara Hepworth, Paula Rego, Kara Walker, Leon Kossoff, Andrzej Jackowski, Emma Woffenden and Grace Pailthorpe.
Image: Madge Gill calico from Bethem: Museum of the Mind and collection of drawings from Louise Bouregois.