Graphite Challenge

For the CDG exhibition 'With Reference to...', Lesley Dearn experimented with graphite in powder form (provided by Jan Bennett).

Graphite drawing by Lesley Dearn

At a cost of fifty pence each, Jan supplied a further eighteen small pots of graphite powder (approx 3 heaped teaspoons) to CDG members present at a meeting on Tuesday 16th October.
Her 'Graphite Challenge' is for members to experiment and do whatever they can with it, then 'show and tell' at a meeting in December.
Jan will be taking part in the Cardiff Open Studios event on 27 - 28 October at Printhaus Studios, and any other members who want to take part in the challenge can pick up some graphite from her there.


The Power Inside The Pencil - Grey Matters: Graphite is a downloadable e-book from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, produced to accompany an exhibition there last year highlighting the expressive potential of graphite through four centuries of drawings from the Museum's holdings.

GV Art Gallery London is running a GRAPHITE Group Exhibition until 8 Dec.
'Drawing is as fundamental to my art making as my skeleton is to my body. Drawing is the bones of my thought." Dorothea Rockburne.


The artists involved have each engaged with this often over-looked medium within contemporary art. Dragan Ilic's interactive sculpture features a snake like piece of rubber stabbed with 3,000 pencils. Pippa Gatty's series of drawings of space matter evokes a cabinet of collected information, both real and imagined. Anais Tondeur's object based work details a narative developed from a pathology specimen of a once swallowed pencil from St Bartholomew's Pathology Museum. Graphite intends to reflect on these innovative and varying explorations by a group of artists, to encourage discussion surrounding the significance of the pencil, and question the belief it is a perfunctory or archaic material.