Drawing Centre Diepenheim | 2022
From September to the end of November 2022, Rachel lived and worked in Diepenheim, NL, as part of Drawing Centre Diepenheim’s Mondriaan Fund residency program in 2022. Through this program, the Mondriaan Fund offers visual artists the opportunity to develop their work, thereby also enriching contemporary visual art and cultural heritage in the Netherlands.
During the working period, Rachel continued to explore how drawing can work within larger issues related to landscape, geology, mining and the aesthetics of climate crisis. She experimented with a number of new media, exploring different ways of expanding her drawing practice to include and absorb her research into excavation landscapes, while also continuing to make meticulous semi-sculptural drawings on crumpled paper with graphite. These drawings made a transition from being flat, wall based pieces to becoming more three dimensional and spatial, accentuating their sculptural possibilities and presence as material and objects in space.
While most of these drawings became part of the exhibition Deep Drawing held at Drawing Centre Diepenheim in 2023, the more experimental works involving projections, visual layering and rubbings (frottage) are still in development, and will evolve into new works in the months to come.
Located in tranquil rural surroundings, Drawing Centre Diepenheim is an art space that offers time and space for close observation, conversation, and opportunities to engage with drawing as a means of discovering and understanding today’s world together. The Drawing Centre’s programme fosters experimentation and research. The Centre encourages expanding the boundaries of the medium, experimenting with new modes of exhibition-making and engaging with new forms of representation. Questioning the role of drawing in the development of contemporary visual art is one of the starting points.
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The studio space is almost empty at the beginning -
Preparing large paper sheets
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Building a carrier for the large drawing Adrift -
The first step is always to prepare the paper
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The studio filled up very fast -
Supports for under the drawing Adrift
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Ferns collected from the many woods around Diepenheim. -
Ancient ferns make up much of the substance of coal
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Light projected onto a graphite drawing of crumpled paper -
Images projected over drawings, in different layers
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Projection of a coal mine over a drawing -
Projection of an excavation landscape over a rubbing made of a beech tree
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Projection of a mine landscape onto a rubbing of a tree stump -
Detail
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A large rubbing made over a period of 4 or 5 days, in a field near the town of Diepenheim -
The width of the oak tree was too broad to fit on one piece of paper, so had to be made in sections
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Each sheet took almost one day to make -
Detail of tools and pencil used to make the rubbing
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Rubbing made indoors, on one sheet of paper -
The detail of this way of working is very fine, with the saw marks and tree nerves both being visible
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Detail SlopeEnd -
The drawing SlopeEnd in an early phase. The work is made of 3 layers, with the top layer being a drawing that has been torn, and the underlayer consisiting of solid drawn graphite.
