Lecture 5: Sketcher-in-Residence: Pushing the Boundaries of Creative Curiosity

Lecture Presenter: Lynne Chapman

In October 2015, I began work on a fascinating commission, as Sketcher-in-Residence at The Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives. Urban sketching is mostly about recording individual ‘snapshots’ of places and moments in time, but what would it be like to immerse yourself in one project for 10 months, capturing the life of a single institution? It was an exciting prospect.

 Since then, I have been filling handmade, accordion sketchbooks. I was given the freedom to draw pretty much anything – following individual academics on research interviews inside people’s homes; poking around in professor’s desk drawers; ear-wigging students conversations in the refectory; sitting in on lectures, meetings and tutorials; plotting the routes people walk through the building… The residency has also been interactive: a group of a dozen academics, most of whom had no drawing experience, volunteered to keep sketchbooks throughout the year. To help empower them to do this, I ran workshops, challenging traditional benchmarks of what makes a successful drawing and offering new ways for them to think about both the page and the subject. I also set up a series of chain-sketchbooks, themed to fit key elements of their working / personal lives, using the accordion format, to mirror my work.

In this lecture, I will be sharing some of the sketchbooks I have created and talking about the experience, as well as discussing ideas raised around empowerment of non-sketchers, sketchbook-as-narrative and the power of sketching as a research tool. The sketchbooks themselves will be exhibited during the symposium at nearby Z-arts and all delegates are invited to the launch event on Friday evening.

Lecture 5: Sketcher-in-Residence: Pushing the Boundaries of Creative Curiosity