Drawing Discussion: From Ice and Water: drawing in precarious environments is an online seminar with guest speakers Tania Kovats, Emma Stibbon and Sarah Casey with Anita Taylor for a discussion about drawing mediating between the human experience and environment. The Drawing Discussion is held in association with Emergency! Sarah Casey, the current exhibition at Drawing Projects UK.

Tania Kovats makes drawings, sculpture, installations and large-scale time-based projects that explore our experience and understanding of the natural world. While Kovats is perhaps best known for her sculptures and drawings, her work encompasses a range of creative strategies, from map-making to writing, and she is also active as a curator, teacher and author. Kovat’s enduring themes are the experience and understanding of landscape, geological processes, patterns of growth and the intersection of landscape, nature and culture and how art can speak to our critical climate crisis. Recently she has focused on water as her central subject; the seas and oceans, river systems, maritime culture, flooding and tides, necessarily touching on socio-political and environmental concerns. Drawing is a central part of her practice and Kovats is a prominent advocate for its importance as a creative and reflective medium. She has written two acclaimed books on the subject, The Drawing Book (2006) and Drawing Water (2014) and is Professor of Making & Drawing at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art Design at the University of Dundee.

Emma Stibbon RA works primarily in drawing and print on paper depicting environments that are undergoing transformation including the polar regions, volcanoes, deserts, coastal and urban locations. Her approach to landscape is driven by a desire to understand how human activity and the forces of nature shape our surroundings. She does this through location based research often working alongside geologists and scientists, and in the studio where information is transformed into large scale drawn and printed artworks. She has taken part in several international residencies including the Artist Placement in Antarctica, organised by the Scott Polar Research Institute (2013); the Arctic Circle.org expedition to Svalbard in the High Arctic (2013); Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut (2016); Artist in Residence at Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park (2016); Project Pressure Grand Canyon National Parks Artist in Residence (2017), Death Valley National Park Arts Foundation (2019), and the Queen Sonja/Artica Svalbard Print Award, Svalbard (2019).

Anita Taylor is an artist, curator and educator, director of the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize and Drawing Projects UK, she is Professor of Fine Art and Dean of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art Design at the University of Dundee.

Sarah Casey is a visual artist and researcher working at the cusp of drawing and sculpture. Her drawings exploring the limits of visibility and material existence arise from working alongside researchers from other fields, ranging from archaeology to astrophysics. Solo exhibitions of her work have been at Kensington Palace, The Bowes Museum and most recently at Ryerson University, Toronto. She also writes on drawing and is co-author of Drawing Investigations: graphic relationships with science, culture and environment (Bloomsbury 2020). She is Senior Lecturer in Drawing and Installation at Lancaster University, UK where she is Director for the School of Fine Art. Sarah was a Royal Drawing School Scottish artist-in-residence in 2020 and a Visiting Research Fellow at The Henry Moore Institute from 2020-21. Her current work explores the provocations of glacial archaeology. With Rebecca Birch and Jen Southern she is co-founder of the Rocky Climates network bringing together artists concerned with the mobilities and temporal, spatial, cultural instabilities of landscapes in uncertain times.


The exhibition, Emergency! Sarah Casey, and this event are part of the Being Human Festival 2022 and is supported by Arts Council England and Lancaster University.