Drawing: Practice and politics

This article focuses on my recent pen and ink drawings, which are multi-panelled works on paper dealing with wars, migration and political themes. They are contextualized in relation to a long career of disruptive themes, as well as the critique and celebration of cities and places through the employment of architectonic, mechanistic and landscape imagery. They are intended to function as visual metaphors for social, cultural and historical narratives. My subject-matter and the deliberate referentiality of drawn detail and semi-recognizable objects, constructions and spaces are discussed in relation to formal issues of texture, manipulation of space and perspectival ambiguity. These relate to some of the ideas about the strategies of making and the special status and properties of drawing that I formulated in my book The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Drawing, 2010. I suggest in conclusion that my life-long commitment to the austerity and economy of drawing reflects my early training in South Africa.