Drawings and correspondence

Tom Nicholson’s Drawings and correspondence is an artist’s book which evolved in parallel to a set of his large charcoal drawings. These drawings were based on a single anonymous archival photograph, held in the collection of the State Library of Victoria, which captured the ‘native encampment’, a short-lived nineteenth-century ethnographic display in the Melbourne Zoo. The book consists of an imaginary email correspondence which responds to the nature of drawing as an activity, and to the meanings of the drawn surface.
Drawings and correspondence was developed during Nicholson’s Creative Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria in 2007–8. It was realised for the exhibition Animism (22 January – 2 May 2010), a collaboration between Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen and the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA), in cooperation with the Kunsthalle Bern, the Generali Foundation Vienna, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin and the Free University Berlin.