Tanoa Sasraku included in Drawing Room’s inaugural exhibition, 22 September – 10 December

As Drawing Room opens in its first, permanent home after twenty years of nomadic activity, UNBUILD: a site of possibility considers the impact of buildings on our bodies, our minds, our memories and our dreams. The selected artists use expanded forms of drawing to explore how the built environment represents our dreams and aspirations, cultural and physical displacement and the inequities of our patriarchal society.

UNBUILD: a site of possibility takes place within and beyond Drawing Room’s physical building as we begin to ask what our new home might offer artists, visitors and the communities that surround it. The richly varied work of Jessie Brennan, Ian Kiaer, Tanoa Sasraku, Emily Speed and Do Ho Suh proposes a range of physical, emotional and political responses to buildings, as places and ideas, that offer us several paths to explore.

For many, the lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic meant our relationships with the spaces we inhabit became more heightened than ever. A Tower to Say Goodbye by Tanoa Sasraku was made over the course of several months in which she occupied a disused postal sorting office, separated from her partner by the pandemic. Constructed from layers of paper that are stitched together, coated in soft pink pastel dust and distressed through the act of tearing, this ‘thickened’ drawing is a manifestation of the physical and psychological effect of spending so much time in isolation and in one building.