Exhibiting Artists:

Mandy Bonnell, Paul Carey-Kent, Emma Cousin, Anne Desmet, Bella Easton, Beverley Duckworth, Peter Freeth, Alison Gill, Steph Goodger, Oona Grimes, Katherine Jones, Jeff Lowe, Mikey Cuddihy, Kathryn Maple, Barbara Nicholls, Michael Petry, Dillwyn Smith & Sue Stockwell

Living Archive Artists:

Artists Anonymous, ATOI, Vasilis Avramidis, Biggs & Collings, Glenn Brown, Jemima Brown, Kayle Brandon, Scarlett Carlos Clarke, Gillian

Carnegie, Claudia Carr, Gordon Cheung, Billy Childish, Graham Crowley, Bella Easton, Edgeworth, Stephen Felmingham, Ryan Gander, Luke Gottelier, Darrell Hawkins, Chris Hawtin, Matthew Herbert, Georgie Hopton, Gary Hume, Zebedee Jones, Andrew Kötting and Eden Kötting, Thoralf Knobloch, Juliette Losq, Lee Maelzer, Marta Marce, Rebecca and Mike, Nicole Mollett, Simon Mullan, Tim Noble, Jonathan Parsons, Julian Perry, Iris Plaitakis, Artemis Potamianou, Frances Richardson, John Stark, Michael Stubbs, Mark Titchner, Trisant, Daphne Warburg Astor, Grant Watson, Richard Wathen, Sinta Werner, Jonathan Wright & Rose Wylie

This is the sixth exhibition in the Collateral Drawing series and the first to present in London. Founded by B E A S T O N Projects in 2014, the long-running curatorial project presents Collateral Drawing: A Living Archive at APT Gallery, Deptford, this autumn. Placing the project’s growing archive at its centre, the exhibition brings together material accumulated over more than a decade from over fifty invited artists. There is more to an artwork than its finished state. Exhibitions conventionally privilege the resolved work, perhaps accompanied by preparatory studies, while much of what surrounds the act of making disappears from view. Collateral Drawing looks instead at these overlooked byproducts: drips, fragments, notes, test prints, maquettes, offcuts, misfires, models, constructions and material residues.

Shown alongside finished artworks, they reveal the decisions, revisions, intuitions and accidents through which work comes into being. The ‘collateral’ can take many forms. It may be a model or construction made to facilitate another work; a discarded fragment that acquires a new significance; past work repurposed within a future work; the recycling of materials across a practice; collected ephemera that acquires meaning through the making process; or marks produced serendipitously through repeated studio activity. Dripped, scratched, taped, erased, smeared, cut, hammered, collected or edited, these traces extend drawing beyond a medium and into an inquisitive way of thinking and making. For this new edition, seventeen artists working across painting, printmaking, installation, photography, sculpture, poetry and performance will each present a resolved artwork with related collateral. One selected byproduct from each contribution will enter the Collateral Drawing archive, extending a collection built through previous editions and preserving material that might otherwise be lost.

The exhibition asks what changes when these apparently secondary materials are treated not as waste, but as meaningful gestures and forms of cultural and critical documentation. Individually they offer intimate clues to an artist’s working process; collectively they record something broader about the material culture of contemporary artmaking—its experimentation, imperfection, repetition, risk and labour. The archive is therefore not conceived as static storage, but as a growing, reflexive resource that can be revisited, reinterpreted and activated through future exhibitions, research and learning.

Collateral Drawing: A Living Archive marks a significant development in the project. For the first time, the archive itself becomes a principal subject of the exhibition, shown alongside new artists and activated through a public programme that will encourage audiences to look beyond the polished surface of finished artworks and engage with the often invisible processes that precede, surround and outlive them.

Since its launch at Plymouth College of Art in 2014, Collateral Drawing has developed through exhibitions in the UK and internationally, including Athens, Berlin, East Anglia and Kent. What began as a curatorial enquiry into the relationship between finished artworks and the material generated around them has evolved into a living archive: one that makes visible the thinking and doing behind art, questions hierarchies of artistic value, and invites curiosity about what is usually left behind.