I Draw Therefore I Think @ First Floor Gallery Harare
Shamilla Aasha, Pebofatso Mokoena & Helen Teede
SOUTH SOUTH
Jitish Kallat Curator


We all think we know what drawing is. After all, it is what happens when we pick up a crayon as a child, the connection between hand a mark-making object and a surface. It is so old so as to seem an inevitable part of who we are as humans, in-built into our idea of how we evolve towards adulthood, how we engage with each other, the world and in fact our own history. Moreover, for every artist life drawing is the pulse of their creativity, for many a daily practice which makes life possible.  At the same time as a foundational practice, it is all too often concealed by layers of skill and materials, polish and presentation. The immediate overshadowed by the archival. The fragile expanded into monumental. 

And yet what lockdown has forced many artists to scale back to the fundamentals, to revisit the intimacy of who they once were and recalibrate what they want to be and it is the Ariadne’s thread of drawing which carried for many the way out of the maze of complications, we found ourselves during the pandemic.

This is why participating ‘I Draw Therefore I am’ devised by Jitish KallatJ as a project was welcomed with a sigh of relief as well as being embraced with enthusiasm in the gallery. Making work as a response to a particular medium, with the freedom to imagine and see where the line takes you pressed a release valve. 

Approaching the project as a conversation and an experiment – Shamilla Aasha, Pebofatso Mokoena and Helen Teede ran away with the idea of developing works which became microcosmic explosions of inner journeys; thrillingly individualistic, visibly divergent, invisibly connected by the feeling that art happens without prescription.

Valerie Kabov
Curator

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