“Drawing as a distinct practice has always been an elusive curiosity to me, perhaps because every line arching through space suggests that it is a drawing, from the bare branches of the ancient oaks in Richmond Park to Stieglitz' stark images of I-beams to the trace of the needle, having punctured the transfer paper, the better for chalk to be pounded through those tiny egresses, making way for a drawing (an under-drawing?) to appear. Perhaps because this sensibility of what drawing is clashes directly with what it is most often shown to be: pages of thoughtful, thick, creative and beautifully made sketchbooks, not a page lacking in intimacy and depth flicker across social media. 

Beautifully bound books, pages encrusted with dust start stutteringly on this subject or that, but always dissolve into lists and maths and reminders never looked at again. 

No, drawing for me is a much more haphazard activity, a temporal necessity, the breadth of a transluscent hair, a quality of mark, line or material, a tracer, a thought gesture. A pin holding the tissue of the beating impulse against a surface, just long enough to leave an imprint. Or it is a scalpel, a blade, an incisor, an axe.

I would not call any of the rough and illegible sketches I make to serve as preparations for anyone other than my chaotic mind to follow. Occasionally, I will meet a mind who can decipher these closer-to-the-diagram expressions as well as I can, and the drawing becomes a working plan, a piece of efficient, if disorganized project planning. An archival imprint of the impulse. 

Now, I worry less if I have a drawing practice, should have one, if it is separate from other practices, if I need to keep track of it, of all the scraps of paper, just in case they mean something to someone someday. I use drawing in the margins of my books, on the stacks of newspapers, and as I cut back through the wet paint with a heavily laden brush, as keen on the act of removal as it is on the act of imprint. 

Drawing is all of these things, then: a knife, an incisor, and a placeholder, a thin and ephemeral thought gesture, something to hold the trembling, arising image to its impulsive genesis, something to keep it from crystalizing into idea. 

To make a section of the website that delineates any work to this category or that is exceptionally difficult, all ways of working bleed into all others, and it is an artificial separation anyway, as I never think "And now I will make a drawing." It is only after, and maybe some months later, that I realize I might photograph that bit of brio scrawled across the door jamb, it is a drawing I'd like to remember making.”

- Kate Howe