When the sketchbook serves as a means to explore the human inner self and to visualize the sensations that are difficult to articulate verbally, how can it reflect the influence of the post-digital age on everyday life? How can the sketchbook transcend its role as a mere collection of visual images to become a sensory archive, a curated space and an assemblage system connecting the physical world with the imagined realm? Drawing on two case studies – the sketchbooks Untitled in Winter 2021 and Untitled 2023 – this paper responds to these questions. By illustrating how sketchbooks can be considered an archive of artists’ sensations, the paper emphasizes the characteristics of slowness embedded in the sequencing of sketchbooks, as well as their making and viewing processes for both artists and viewers. When these pages of sketches are gathered and considered as a whole, the sketchbook appears to be a curated personal space for artists. Yet, it is a special type of spontaneous curation, guided by artists’ bodily experience and recognized retrospectively. By suggesting both sketchbooks and post-digital internet are assemblage systems, this paper proposes that the slowness and sensual qualities of sketchbooks provide a means of critiquing the post-digital age, which prioritizes efficiency.
As part of my practice-based research, I spent over fourteen months drawing in my dead neighbour’s flat. That these drawings were all made in sketchbooks is key, as is the fact that they, and the drawings in them, are the work entire. This reflective report attempts to make sense of the pivotal role these sketchbooks played in this research. Referring to Derrida’s theories on the ‘underside’ of a drawing, I discuss the physicality of my sketchbooks and their effect on the event of drawing, the drawings themselves and their containment of space; this is an interiority that mirrors the flat where they were made. Jonathan Jones writes of Hockney’s sketchbooks as ‘his true home’, a suggestion that, as with Bachelard’s notion of the house as a space ‘that shelters daydreaming’, such books are a safe, yet liberating, place in which to draw. But what if a home becomes, as with my neighbour’s flat, a signifier of death, one that reduces the artist and her drawings to the notion of what Kristeva called the ‘abject’. Here, the sketchbook can become a harbourer of shame.
This article explores the sketchbook as a palimpsestic medium developed through in-situ drawing with a portable camera lucida. Focusing on the I Passaporti sketchbooks produced in Rome, it reflects on how drawing unfolds through this practice. By considering the page as a space negotiated through encounters with place, the discussion approaches the sketchbook as a palimpsestic placeholder, emphasizing its role as a continually recounting structure shaped through drawing. Approaching the page as a site where drawing holds space and place as an ongoing relation, the article elaborates on how experience is registered, revisited and extended across multiple acts of engagement. Unfinished pages remain open to further work, allowing earlier marks to stay present and available within the drawing process. In this way, the sketchbook is positioned as both record and proposition – a portable, tactile field that privileges incompletion, multiplicity and openness. Through its emphasis on movement and iterative engagement, the article situates drawing within phenomenological accounts of place that understand space as lived and continually formed, alongside ideas of walking as enunciation and the drawn line as ongoing correspondence. Together, these perspectives frame the sketchbook as a critical mode of inquiry into drawing as a spatial practice and the fragmentary character of urban experience.
This research demonstrates the sketchbook not as a passive container for preparatory drawings but as a curatorial dispositif that actively shapes artistic thought and practice. Drawing from a three-year engagement with a modular, flexi-page sketchbook, the research explores how expanded sketchbook practices operate through reconfiguration, recursion and transmediality. Informed by theories of material thinking (Bolt), curatorial transformation (Groys) and drawing as correspondence (Ingold), the sketchbook is positioned as a micro-curatorial structure – one that stages visual knowledge production through ongoing negotiation with materials, bodies and digital technologies. Two practice-led case studies – Drawing and the Body and The Folding – exhibit how the sketchbook facilitates embodied movement, machinic translation and analogue–digital interplay. Across these episodes, the sketchbook emerges as an active, provisional surface that conditions drawing through proximity, attention and return. Rather than documenting resolved compositions, it generates situated events, holding drawing in a state of becoming. This approach challenges traditional separations between drawing and curation, proposing the sketchbook as a living curatorial field that composes relations rather than displays outcomes. In doing so, the article advances a new understanding of the sketchbook as a space of affective and performative thinking-with.
This article contributes to this Special Issue with a focus on drawing intertwined with the author’s artist-publisher-researcher (APR) practice-research approach situated in the discipline of publishing and contemporary book cultures. This article connects with but expands the disciplinary focus of drawing, research, theory and practice from hitherto more commonly discussed fields of architecture, design and the visual arts. After outlining the APR research practice, categories of the visual and material details of a range of formats and structures of sketchbooks, from the factory-made to the handmade, are considered. Discussion of these categories concentrates on the respective functions of the sketchbook and the modes of drawing they afford the author in her APR methodology. Analysis of the roles of sketchbooks as a mechanism for knowledge production engages with 4E and 6E cognitive frameworks (). In doing so, the process of sketchbook making itself as cognition in the production of experimental publications is illuminated. The contribution of this article relates to the relevance and significance of the new angles on the sketchbook it reveals as a mechanism for knowledge construction processes in the context of contemporary book cultures and publishing studies.
