Student Spotlight: Sabine Jones

Drawing Practices

As Programme Leader for the BA (Hons) Drawing degree I have been eager to see how the new degree pathway we have designed is working out for students. Drawing is a hugely broad discipline that extends into all sorts of processes and approaches. I’ve asked a few students on the very first unit of the degree Drawing Practices, how things are going and I am pleased today to shine a spotlight on the second of them, Sabine Jones.

ED: What were you doing with drawing before you joined OCA and what informed your decision to embark on a drawing degree?

SJ: I had carried sketchbooks for years and filled them as regularly as I could but it felt like the opportunity to do so ebbed and flowed according to a rhythm set by outside life. These books increasingly became collections of incomplete thoughts that I wanted to explore and get to know better. I kept returning to the thought that I needed to demarcate a mental space that made this possible for me. I had always wished that I had done an art degree; my awareness of this became more pressing until one day it reached a critical mass: now or never. Take the leap. I filled out the form and pressed the button. Done. And so it began. There was no perfect moment that facilitated this, the time juggle had not become less challenging, nor the financial one. It had simply reached the point of not wanting to risk never doing it; a commitment to just do what so many other people have done: just try and make it work.

ED: Has your first drawing unit been what you expected it would be?

SJ: No. It is much more intense and I am thrilled by that. It is simultaneously the single most challenging and valuable feature of the course. That intensity throws you into a mind-set that allows each project to really absorb you, and when that project ends the changes in thought and practice that it has fostered continue with you into the next one. You are constantly evolving. 

The generosity of tuition has been invaluable. There is a recognition that as an OCA student you can be working in a more isolated way than at a bricks and mortar university. This adds pressure to the quality of the interactions that you do get from face-to-face discussions. My tutor brings huge knowledge, but most importantly for me, an authenticity and passion for his subject. This is really important in validating your own belief that this practice of drawing and making is exactly as exciting and compelling as you feel it is.

In group tutorials I have been enormously lucky to find a group of students who are also so aware of the privilege of making art and how much is poured into this process. We take time to communicate with each other regularly. It is so valuable to have that dialogue with people who are equally passionate about drawing.

I have an Art History degree originally, and felt that I might be fairly well versed in this side of the degree, however I have been completely enthralled by the range of practitioners out there and to whom we are introduced. There is such an excitement in coming across someone in whose work you see an instant connection with your own sense of the world, but equally in encountering an entirely different way of seeing things. There is no echo chamber here and that is stimulating (and necessary).

ED: Is there a drawing you have produced during 1.1 Drawing Practices that really taught you something about drawing – and what was it?

SJ: This is a hard question to answer. Every drawing I make now changes what I will make next. When I look back at previous projects I can see how and why I made the drawings as they are. I would remake them very differently today. These drawings are a snapshot of a moment.

I love drawing people. It would be easy to put forward a portrait of a face as something that I’m proud of but I will be honest about where the change has been. I can think of two early drawing projects that changed my relationship to drawing in that I was able to allow myself to start to be on the paper. One is a narrative piece. It is a journey through Paris, from where my family lived, through graveyards and shop-fronts; it evolves into an increasingly semi-conscious rearrangement of those memories in the state between wakefulness and sleep. These images mean nothing to anyone else. I was, however, able to accept not needing to justify wanting to make this piece. The other piece is a portrait based only on legs, boots and an over-filled bag. 

These pieces were important for me because they reflect an ability to free yourself from seeing your work as an external viewer, as their judgement. This is a route to flow in the process of making. You make it because you want to make it. Your ego is not on the page. 

These were the very start of a desire to engage a gradual freeing of style and concept. My intention has been to free myself of having to render everything (this takes confidence), to leave gaps, to create pauses. This is (oh so) gradually happening. My work now is looser, coloured sometimes and moving towards something else. I had to make these first images to get there.

I would make these images completely differently today, which is good, but it is also only because I made them like this first.

ED: What advice would you give students starting 1.1 or anyone who is struggling with their studies just now?

SJ: Free yourself from an expected narrative. When you go to a gallery and see an exhibition, the story (whether about a single artist or a particular movement) has a beautiful direction to it. You walk away stimulated and inspired. The artwork is often presented as standing for that artist. It’s the same in many art books. It’s wonderful, thought-provoking, but it is also, often, rich with omissions. There are no “mistakes” on the wall. There is little evidence of the (ordinary) life lived with the making of art.

Every time you make a submission of your own work, you are offering up a much less filtered, and in the moment, drawing. This is a comparatively un-curated process. Whilst putting yourself into this process is vital, you cannot see this work as standing for you, as artworks are so often presented. The person who made last month’s project is not the one making this one. It often feels (after the fact) that the point of highest conflict with your work is, in retrospect, a point of breakthrough. Maybe that work flourishes, maybe it doesn’t, but you are pushing through something, butting up against resistance, in that process. It is easier said than done, especially when time is such a commodity, but try to lean into that struggle. It is necessary.

In one final nod to that evolution, I’m sure if you ask me to answer these questions a year from now, the answers will, once again, be different.