Drawing Research Forum 2023/24 Sessions – Part 2

The session will feature presentations and a plenary discussion with artists examining diverse themes, and utilising and developing current discourse around contemporary drawing.  The Drawing Research Forum provides a space for knowledge exchange between disciplines, encourages cross-fertilization of ideas and methodology, and fosters collaborations between artists and researchers.

Presentations include:

• Sasha Bergstrom-Katz – Art as Mental Imaging
• Grace Schwindt – Marking Memories of Historical Trauma
• Nicky Coutts – Drawing Beyond Human

View full programme here

Sasha Bergstrom-Katz is an artist and researcher working on technologies, objects and concepts from the history of the human sciences. Her recent PhD thesis entitled ‘On Intelligence Tests: Psychological Objects and their Subjects’ makes an aesthetic enquiry into the material cultures and history of intelligence testing in the United States. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow and artist-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and is co-editing a forthcoming volume on the topic of art & psychotherapy alongside Dr Sarah Marks and Dr Suzanne Hudson. 

Grace Schwindt is based in London, UK and works with sculpture, performance, film and drawing. Through her work she unfolds visual narratives exploring the effects of capitalist culture upon the body and psyche of the individual. She analyses the role that bodies, language and objects play in the construction of history and memory.  Schwindt’s works have been presented in museums and galleries as well as in theatres and other performance contexts. Recent solo exhibitions include Lacuna at Zeno X Gallery in Belgium in 2023, Defiant Bodies at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland in 2022/2023, and Your Movement at Kunsthal Gent, Belgium in 2022.

Dr Nicky Coutts is an artist, researcher, and writer. She is currently Research Lead in the School of Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art. Her research focuses on the pressures that humans place on species diversity and the environment, and the role of cross-species interactions in finding alternative ways to interact and live. Through a writing and visual practice centering on drawing, she explores how ‘language’ is often used to sustain the status quo and the potential for this to be shifted through working closely with ‘oddkin’ (Haraway). Her work has been shown widely in galleries and museums and she has a parallel writing practice with a forthcoming commission for 2HB at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow.