The Drawing Shop

PV: Thursday, 10th April 2025, 6 – 9pm

Open: 11th April- 18th May 2025, Thursday – Sunday, 11am – 5pm

19th May – 10th June 2025, Monday – Thursday, 11am – 7pm

‘The Drawing Shop’ is a collaboration between artist Johnsey and ArtWorks, a group of artists who have a learning disability, are autistic or both. As The Drawing Shop they have worked in ongoing
collaboration with the public, schools and other community groups, to create an ever growing archive of drawings, paintings and sketchbooks with the starting point of mark-making. Their collaborative practice has generated over 1000 drawings, paintings and sketchbooks of works in progress called ‘The Drawing Shop’ which they invite the public to collaborate on with them. Through their practice they aim to blur the boundaries between artist, participant and audience through active involvement and responsive collaboration. Through a series of basic drawing exercises they create abstract works that explore mark-making in response to music, other marks, and each other. The works are an explosion of abstract forms and colour, whilst the process invites their collaborators to draw and paint intuitively with their eyes closed in response to music. Then with eyes open everyone is free to add,
edit, and recreate any part of the drawings and paintings as they wish. In turn this occasionally adds some figurative elements to the abstract works, leaving hundreds of personal responses and drawn
records of each artist’s experience.

‘The Drawing Shop’ is an inclusive and accessible open-studio environment where the public are invited to engage in free creative sessions with ‘The Drawing Shop’ team, and everyone is welcome! They currently operate on a pop-up basis moving from space to space, and this time they are in Hillsborough and have taken over the old Wilkos.