The Sketchbooks, 2020

This exhibition is a collaborative project between Monica Lloyd and Aneesa Shami, a joint mythos that combines their personal histories and cultural observations. Using scraps of paper, magazine images and discarded book pages, the artists traded two sketchbooks between themselves for several months, responding to one another’s abstract imagery and unique processes. Blending their memories and experiences together formed a new, third voice that began to influence their individual practices. Curious to see how the sketchbook compositions could be expanded upon, both artists revisited their preferred mediums to create visceral experiences for the viewer out of rescued textiles and discarded paper.

The Sketchbooks (myth)

During a time of illness, political unrest and social reconstruction, two women pieced together a joint mythos to make sense of the chaos around them. Combining their personal histories and cultural observations, the women formed new realities within the pages of two sketchbooks. Using their similar, yet unique, processes of creating, they gave new life to discarded materials, layering scraps of paper to create abstracted landscapes. The women continued pouring their anger, pain and confusion into their creations, watching figures emerge from lines of ink and torn paper edges to inhabit new planes of existence. The book pages could no longer contain these fragmented worlds, and spilled out into different forms, occupying three dimensions and transforming the womens’ own space.

by Monica Lloyd and Aneesa Shami
Photos by Cecily Brown