Making Drawing as Expanded Practice Accessible: a Large Scale, Collaborative, Installation Driven Approach

When my own drawing practice evolved from the making of intimate, mono-focal, plein air ink and water media drawings to massive, dimensional, multi-focal collage installations (as a way of more powerfully evoking the totality of the urban spaces that inspired them) I began to consider the potential of the process I was developing in the classroom as a way to teach students both a novel manner of researching content (exploding the sketchbook outside of the bounds of the book) as well as an accessible way of connecting them to the idea of drawing as expanded media. Today, I lead students of extremely various ages, levels of experience, and contexts in workshops which lead them to the production of large scale, dimensional, collaborative collage drawing installations. These workshops are able to fit any number of conceptual concerns (the collage process allows for a multifocal exploration of any idea – not just built landscape) while giving students confidence in large scale, gestural drawing, drawing with light and shadow, making connections between formally disparate parts, and constructing spatially. The processes are cheap, accessible, and easily learned; the results are physically impressive and emboldening; and, along the way, students connect powerfully to the importance of research, the relationship of form to content, the value of collaboration and differing points of view, and the possibility for drawing to vitally exist beyond the page.