Drawing as Slow Conversation
Louise Adkins & benjamin Jenner.
Drawing and Mixed Media Collage.
Greyscale Plastic, (florist plastic, cartridge paper, wooden batons, rubber washers, wooden blocks, screws) 2024.
From left to right: Speckled Eye, (cartridge paper, photocopy, wooden batons, rubber washers, wooden blocks, screws) 2024.
Keyhole 2, (wood vaneer clipboard, mechanic’s clip, cartridge paper) 2024.
QU2, (Chinese calligraphy paper, cartridge paper, wooden batons, bulldog clips, oil pastel, rubber washers, screws) 2024.
The Writers' Room, Florence Trust London
Publication: Writers' Room WWild Pansy Press University of Leeds.
Image credit: Ben Jennaer
In December 2024, Louise Adkins and Benjamin Jenner completed a month-long residency at The Writers' Room, Florence Trust in London, where they developed a series of large-scale wall- and floor-based compositions in response to the studio space's architecture and layered histories. Throughout the process, they conceptualized these works as an ongoing dialogue - between one another, the materials, and the emergent forms within the studio. The resulting compositions represent an embodied language shaped by the actions and behaviors that defined and described their cohabitation of the room. The peculiar logic of this "slow conversation" challenged their preconceived notions of construction and composition, ultimately generating a site-responsive, "extralinguistic" vocabulary of forms.
About Louise Adkins & Ben Jenner.
Adkins and Jenner come together to ask questions of each other’s understanding of the limits of language and its interface with site, materiality and gesture. Their shared interest in scripting everyday exchanges between people, objects and the world has provided a platform to interrogate alternative routes to knowledge – how know-how can be written out of and into words. Such observations, they have discovered, require a type of time that is hard to come by. As a result, their time together orbits around strategies for implementing slowness in observation – a temporality that resonates with expanded forms of embodied drawing. Adkins and Jenner met whilst studying on the PhD program at the University of Leeds. In 2022 they founded Reading and Writing Bodies in Space (RWBS), a group of artists, writers, and researchers that convene around re-cognising the bodies relationship to knowledge through crip theory and disability studies. In spring 2024 RWBS facilitated Practice Notes #1 at The Project Space, University of Leeds. In autumn 2024 Adkins and Jenner completed Drawing as Slow Conversation at the Writers’ Room in London.
Publication: Writers' Room WWild Pansy Press University of Leeds.
Image credit: Ben Jennaer
In December 2024, Louise Adkins and Benjamin Jenner completed a month-long residency at The Writers' Room, Florence Trust in London, where they developed a series of large-scale wall- and floor-based compositions in response to the studio space's architecture and layered histories. Throughout the process, they conceptualized these works as an ongoing dialogue - between one another, the materials, and the emergent forms within the studio. The resulting compositions represent an embodied language shaped by the actions and behaviors that defined and described their cohabitation of the room. The peculiar logic of this "slow conversation" challenged their preconceived notions of construction and composition, ultimately generating a site-responsive, "extralinguistic" vocabulary of forms.
About Louise Adkins & Ben Jenner.
Adkins and Jenner come together to ask questions of each other’s understanding of the limits of language and its interface with site, materiality and gesture. Their shared interest in scripting everyday exchanges between people, objects and the world has provided a platform to interrogate alternative routes to knowledge – how know-how can be written out of and into words. Such observations, they have discovered, require a type of time that is hard to come by. As a result, their time together orbits around strategies for implementing slowness in observation – a temporality that resonates with expanded forms of embodied drawing. Adkins and Jenner met whilst studying on the PhD program at the University of Leeds. In 2022 they founded Reading and Writing Bodies in Space (RWBS), a group of artists, writers, and researchers that convene around re-cognising the bodies relationship to knowledge through crip theory and disability studies. In spring 2024 RWBS facilitated Practice Notes #1 at The Project Space, University of Leeds. In autumn 2024 Adkins and Jenner completed Drawing as Slow Conversation at the Writers’ Room in London.
