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Peasants Have no Skills for Drawing: Drawing from the Autobiographical Narrative and Other Places


Joana Maria Pereira, CIEBA - Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon

 

 

 

Can thinking and making drawing enable us to convey and promote fairer and more inclusive modes of relating to and dwelling with each other? How can drawing research be used to challenge mastery, ostentation and elitism? These are questions that arise through my drawing processes and research methodologies as I expand on the power of the autobiography to undermine arrogance and authoritarianism.

 

I draw the title of this paper, ‘Peasants Have no Skills for Drawing’, from a drawing project assignment I developed more than twenty years ago, when I was studying at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Porto, to examine the potential of drawing to move across class and gender divides. The paper will draw on my essay ‘To Baffle The Place of Mastery’ (Chapter 8 in the forthcoming book Drawing as Placemaking’, 2024) which interweaves a range of theoretical perspectives from film, philosophy and literature, personal recollections, and different reflections on drawing processes and materials to propose an understanding of drawing as an essentially democratic act.

 

This paper will also discuss issues around notions of ‘inactivity’ and practices of ‘not-making’ that are central to my own artistic practice. I am interested in exploring ways in which drawing itself seems to dismiss drawing (that is, drawing’s outcome). As well as their emphasis on duration, processes and materiality, the singularity of the experiences upon which drawing projects are developed is due to the fact that they are grounded less in seeing and more in listening. It is not only possible to equate drawing with the absence of rigid forms and norms as a strategy to resist bourgeois and colonial habits; drawing must also be framed here within an important logic of relation. In other words, drawing initiates conversations between different periods of time, ‘old’ and ‘new’ works, between myself, my ancestors and the history of my country, Portugal.

 

Thus, one of the intentions of this paper is to investigate how certain drawing processes might potentially enable social engagement in order to demonstrate through drawing that ways of making and thinking cannot be divorced from each other, that the different social-cultural contexts in which we operate have implications for our practices. ‘Peasants Have no Skills for Drawing’ aims to address important questions about class privilege, inequality and elitism within the arts and the academia, and its implication for intersectional forms of exclusion and stigmatisation.

 

Keywords: Drawing Research, Not-making, Inequality, Autobiographical Narrative, Social-Political Sphere


Biography
Joana studied Sculpture (2003) at the FBAUP, and completed a Master’s degree in Drawing and Printmaking there (2009). She was awarded a PhD by the Royal College of Art (2021). Joana has lectured internationally since 2009, most recently at UCA Farnham, where she presented ‘Women Who are at Odds with Home’, at Drawing Conversations 5 (2024). She has contributed chapters to Drawing as Placemaking: Environment, History and Identity, and The Handbook of Drawing Research, to be published by Bloomsbury (2024 and 2025). Her research interests include the politics of methods and materials, social inequality, intangible heritage, and feminism.