Abstract

This published article in a Special Issue of the Sculpture Journal is the development of a paper “Signing and Signalling: Some Polemics around Sculptor's Drawings”, delivered at the symposium Sculpture on Paper at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 19th March 2004, Following the Henry Moore conference, Petherbridge was invited to participate in the international scholars’ study day accompanying the exhibition and publication Sculpter au crayon, Dessins de sculpteurs du XVIIe siècle à nos jours, at the Bibliothèque royale des Belgique, Brussels where she delivered the paper “The Rejection of Matter: Contemporary Drawings and Multi Practice”, 3 December 2004. In different ways, both these papers questioned the standard view that sculptors’ drawings constitute a distinctive and recognisable body of work, and proposes instead the notion of contemporary “multi-practice” and its revolutionary relationship to earlier models of preparatory drawing and studio practice. Questions of practice and the “demise of System” are essential to Petherbridge’s analysis of contemporary drawing contained in the forthcoming trans-historical and thematic study of drawing practice, Drawing: Making and Thinking, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2008. It is hoped that this very comprehensive book will be complemented by a publication of collected essays focussing on contemporary drawing issues, to include “On Models and Mickey Mouse” published in The International Journal of Art & Design Education, Volume 24, No. 2, 2005 (pp126-137) (ISSN 1476-8062 Print and ISSN 1476-8070 Online) Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Oxford and “On the Moving Line and the Future Subjunctive of Drawing in a post-Duchampian Age” in Futures (Journal of Policy Planning & Future Studies), Special Issue Futures of Art, ed. Dr. Juliet Steyn, City University, 2007, Elsiever Publishers, UK & Holland (ISSN 0016-3287). These articles critically address issues of popular culture in the context of social analysis and pedagogy.