Letting it settle

Letting it settle was an exhibition of new work by hyphæ drawing collective, from 9th - 13th September 2021 at Touchbase Gallery, Folkestone

Contemporary drawings by ten artists who came together to create in a space for cross-pollination of ideas, to share practices and to offer mutual support.

Charcoal, graphite and ink; marks, scratches, and thoughts emerge as a correspondence with interweaving sub-plots, branches and connections.

hyphæ drawing collective / Letting it settle - a meandering line cuts between the words, like a path or trace. Ten names appear in the lower left.

About the exhibition

Letting it settle was an exhibition of new work by hyphæ drawing collective: a group of ten artists who all value drawing as a vital part of their creative practice. The show gathered together drawings that emerged from six weeks of intensive remote collaboration.

The collective met online during the lockdown of early 2021, through the Drawing Correspondence development programme. Gradually this shared work evolved into a community based on mutual support and joint explorations of drawing and of what it might become for each.

They borrow their name, hyphæ, from the branching filaments of fungus that form the mycelium – a buried web of communication and nourishment between the trees in a forest. Letting it settle is a first union of drawings made while physically separate, but regularly present in the practice of drawing together. Online co-presence, and the conversations and connections it allowed to flourish, became the basis of a shared space of vulnerability and trust, within which experiments and new growth could happen.

The drawings can be seen as material thoughts, silting into an organic substrate, an understory. Affinities of touch and sensibility emerge. Charcoal, graphite, ink; marks, scratches and layers – together these form a tangle of resonances, accumulations and drifts of pigment and ideas, sub-plots and strands that connect each to the other. They very much appreciate your attention.

Nichola Scrutton - Grid Drawing (detail)