Workshop with Kirsty Badenoch – 22 February 2025

Land Lines: Drawing as Working the Land
11.00–16.00, Saturday 22 February 2025
8 Smart’s Place, London WC2B 5LW

About the Workshop

Drawing Matter is pleased to invite Kirsty Badenoch to lead the first event of our Public Programme in London.

Based on the working drawings and design processes of the late Alberto Ponis and his wife Annarita, the workshop explores ways of reading, walking, and drawing with the landscape.

Alberto Ponis (1933), Plan, Yacht Club Path, Punta Sardegna, Sardinia, 1965. Coloured ink over print base on pink paper, 363 × 1015 mm. DMC 2921.1.

Alberto Ponis (1933), Plan, Yacht Club Path, Punta Sardegna, Sardinia, 1965. Coloured inks over print base on yellow paper, 365 × 1007 mm. DMC 2921.2.

Alberto and Annarita’s drawing, designing and building processes are deeply rooted in place – connecting local landscape knowledge with organic modernism, ecology with geology, craft with weather with wild. To mark the passing of Alberto in Autumn 2024, we’ll be tracing their footsteps and fingerprints from London to Sardinia and back. Working with Ponis’ pathway drawings in the Drawing Matter archive alongside geological maps of London and Sardinia, we’ll draw time-and-space connections. We’ll embark on drawing “walks” together, exploring ideas of drawing-as-listening, and observing-as-designing. The workshop will be embodied, involving physical as well as metaphorical walks, and drawing at 1:1. We will work with originals from the Drawing Matter Collection – the Ponis’ original drawings, and John Ruskin’s rock collection.

The workshop will involve large-scale drawing using the whole body, and we’ll be working on the floor without shoes for some of the day. Please wear comfortable clothing that you don’t mind getting a little messy. Please let us know in advance if you have any specific accessibility or physical requirements, and feel free to bring cushions. Numbers are limited as we’ll be a small, intimate group. All drawing materials will be provided.

All workshop proceeds go towards materials and paying workshop facilitators.

Kirsty Badenoch is an independent artist, drawing researcher and architect. She works with fragile and fractured landscapes, communities and ecologies to develop place-based projects that forefront more-than-human agency. With 10 years experience practicing landscape architecture, Kirsty currently teaches at The Bartlett School of Architecture and University of Cambridge; and has led drawing workshops and courses at Goldsmiths UAL, Drawing Room and Architectural Association. Kirsty is curator at Microscope, an experimental arts-and-ecology space in Dalston.

*Photographs from Kirsty Badenoch’s workshop as part of the “Unbuild” exhibition at Drawing Room, 2023, courtesy of Drawing Room*.

This event marks the start of Drawing Matter’s Public Programme in London, which will explore how we can work with artists of all disciplines to create ways for a wider public to experience the drawings collection.

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