What happens when drawing is understood as process rather than artifact? How do we draw movement, emergence, atmosphere, relation, or potential? How do we notate something alive, unfinished, or still in the making? How do we think through drawing? How does drawing think?
We understand drawing as an embodied and situated practice, a continuous feedback loop of resonance between hand, eye, body, mind, material, and environment. Drawing as relation: resonating with others, with places, with sensations, with ideas in formation; operating through marks, gestures, lines, images, words, and other forms of notation.
We welcome contributions that engage drawing as research and experimentation: drawing with, through, beyond, and on drawing itself. Submissions may be visual, textual, diagrammatic, performative, digital, analogue, moving, hybrid, or otherwise difficult to classify.
We invite drawings, visual essays, research articles, notations, and experimental formats that remain with the question of drawing and explore its potential as an open-ended practice of thinking, making, and becoming.
Guest editors:
Ilga Leimanis - University of the Arts London (UK)
Michelle Salamon - University of the Arts London (UK)
Bart Geerts - LUCA School of Arts - KU Leuven (Belgium)
Nikolaus Gansterer - University of Applied Arts Vienna (Austria)
Calendar:
Abstract submission until the end of October 2026.
Full paper submission until the end of January 2027.
Acceptance communication until August 2027.
Publication of the Issue until October 2027.
Thematic call for Black Book: Drawing and Sketching (BBDS), an Open-Access, Peer-Reviewed Journal.
Submissions should be made through the BBDS journal publishing platform.
Image credits: “Margaret Barr's "Strange Children" [ballet], 1955 / photographer unknown” by State Library of New South Wales, No known copyright restrictions
