DRAWING - A residency week - Drawing without a Map

Course Dates January 22nd to 26th January (Mon - Friday) 2024

Image by Sarah Ketelaars

This week long residency is for anyone wishing to use drawing to expand their practice, giving dedicated time and a generous space to commit to making your work. This might be a space where you choose to work large and experimentally; it might be a space to spread out and look at lots of your work together, making helpful connections so that you can develop it further. It will be a space where you are supported and inspired by the company of other artists. We learn from each other. Katie Sollohub will be making large scale drawings and installations, exploring the purpose of drawing as a practice. Drawing has always been integral to her work, whether hand in hand with painting or in its own right. Her role during the residency is to support and facilitate discussions and to encourage experimentation by example, rather than to lead and “teach”. It is an opportunity to see how she uses her own practice to make work and navigates the highs and lows of the work as it progresses in real time. During the week each artist will be exploring their own themes and subject. Everyone has a large working space and use of any of the studio equipment and materials that they need. It is a physical and mental space that you can stretch into and perhaps do work that you would not dare to do by yourself, in your own studio.

“Drawing is for me about being present, seeing with awareness, responding to the space around me, as well as the space within me. With drawing, I can let go of control and follow the touch of my materials, the movement of my hand, and enjoy it like a dance. This will be a week of improvisation. Come and join me in this dance.

When I draw, I mostly don’t have a plan. It’s like going for a walk without a map - I trust that I will get where I need to be, and along the way I pay attention to all that I see, so that in each moment I am fully present. I may not know where I am going, but I know where I am. I often work from observation, of the space around me, the objects I interact with, mapping out where I am. I aim to use this residency week to explore what happens when I have a large space, and a sustained length of time, to simply draw, and explore, with no boundaries except the length of my reach. And where my arm is not long enough, I will climb a ladder, or make extensions with charcoal on sticks. To be totally immersed in the process of drawing.” Katie Sollohub

This week follows from the three day Making Room for Drawing, and would be an ideal partner course to follow on from this - make your space over 3 days, and keep working with it for the next 5 days. It will also be perfect for anyone whose practice has drawing at its core, wants to explore a new subject, likes the spontaneity and freedom of drawing, and feels excited by the prospect of taking risks with the scale and content of what a drawing could be.

Apply for a place on a Residency

To ensure that your time is really well spent during your residency week we would like you to make an application. Preparing well before you come and having an online tutorial will be a huge benefit. Please submit 9 images of your work and two pieces of writing, each no more than 300 words. The first should be about your process and inspiration for your work. The second is about what you would like to get out of the residency and what you think you might need in terms of materials and equipment.

We will consider your application and get back to you quickly. If your application is successful we will fix a date and time for a one hour online tutorial with the tutor running the residency of your choice. This tutorial is an opportunity for a discussion about the most productive way to prepare for the residency week in terms of studies and preparatory work to bring with you and also what the studio can have in place for you when you arrive. It is also a time to discuss your work and get feedback from a fellow artist.

Please email your application to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.