Artists Taking About Art | Expanded Drawing, a panel discussion

Presented as part of North Sydney Council's Artists Talking About Art series and open to anyone interested in drawing, art marking or talking about art!

Join Primrose Park Studio Artist Toshiko Oiyama together with Jody Graham and Gary Warner to see their work and gain insights into their drawing styles that have seen each of their works included in major art prizes and exhibitions.

The session begins with a demonstration by each artist of their drawing techiques followed by a discussion panel.

Toshiko Oiyama is a current Artist in Residence at Primrose Park Artists Studio. For Toshiko, drawing is a way of asking questions that cannot be answered in words.  One question she has been asking is what it means for all things to be in a constant state of transience. She explores the fundamental nature of transience that also contains, paradoxically, the unchanging law that governs everything in the physical universe. Using free-flowing ink, thread as drawing media, and systemic grid made of pinhole punctures, she experiments with the interaction between the 2D surface of paper and the 3D effects of punctures and threads. She is a winner of Tim Olsen Drawing Prize, and has been a finalist in Dobell Drawing Prize, Hazelhurst Art on Paper, Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing, and Kedumba Drawing Award. She holds a PhD and a Masters degree in fine art from the University of New South Wales, College of Fine Arts (COFA, now Art and Design UNSW). Toshiko lectures in drawing at National Art School.

Jody Graham's practice encompasses drawing, mixed media, sculpture and installation. Her work celebrates the broken, displaced and forgotten and speaks to her long-nurtured compulsion to restore and rescue with a strong anti-consumerist, re-use and re-cycle ethos across her practice. Investigating mark making is at the core of everything Jody does, often using unconventional tools and approaches when drawing, such as a rocks, bones or wire bound to the back of her hand, stick or a bent umbrella.

Jody exhibits frequently in solo and important group exhibitions. She won the Adelaide Drawing Prize in 2022, the Open Greenway Art Prize in 2017 (and local prize again in 2020) and has been a finalist in many major art prizes, including the 66th Blake Prize, Sculptures at Scenic World and at the Muswellbrook, Paddington, and NSW Parliament’s Plein Air painting prizes.Her work as been acquired twice for the Kedumba Drawing Collection, a finalist in the Jacaranda and Swan Hill Drawing Awards; and selected for the Dobell, Rick Amor, and Tim Olsen drawing prizes. Graham’s work is held in the Kedumba Collection of Australian Drawings, the Perry Drawing Collection and in Waverley and Blacktown City Council collections, at the Western Sydney Institute, in the Nepean Arts and Design Centre, and in private collections nationally and in the UK, USA, Dubai and New Zealand.

Jody has a Master of Art from UNSW Art and Design.

Gary Warner is an artist and art worker in the cultural sector for over 40 years with a self-taught background in experimental filmmaking, visual arts, photography, music and sound art, digital media production, natural sciences, poetry and buddhism. Gary has worked at the Australian Film Commission supporting electronic media arts programs, he was Chair of the Coordinating Committee and Co-Curator of the Third International Symposium on Electronic Art in Sydney in 1992.  Since 2018, Gary has been teaching experimental drawing at the National Art School in Sydney and has developed and run workshops in autonomous drawing machines there and at the University of Technology Sydney and Monash University’s Sensilab.

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Image detail Shoals by Toshiko Oiyama