Drawing as Placemaking: Environment, History and Identity

Drawing as Placemaking: Environment, History and Identity, considers a range of contemporary drawing practices which engage with historical sites of narrative, with real and imagined places, and with drawing and the body as places of making. It focuses on how drawings and drawing processes can examine and articulate our relationships to placemaking, to our concepts of home, to historical and memorial sites, to our personal histories, and to imagined and actual places. The chapters and conversations with artists expand upon the complexities of the relationship between drawing and a particular position, point, area in space, location or home. The contributing artists use expanded drawing approaches to present different perspectives on how drawings are made, and how they can be used to describe, analyse, reimagine, transform and to make new actual, historical, and psychological places. The artist authored chapters and the conversations with artists are interwoven to facilitate broader conversations about our human interactions with place, through all our senses; what we can see, touch, feel and hear, alongside what we know, theorise or imagine. The re-evaluation of placemaking from a range of cultural perspectives highlights new stories whilst reconsidering older ones. The exploration of projected and imagined places – outer space, and the shape of the world in the future, are also explored. The book reveals new and contemporary insights into the long historical connection between drawing and placemaking and contributes to new debates around placemaking. It offers to a deeper understanding of how we use drawing to better define ourselves and our place in the world.