Drawing Room, Unit 1b New Tannery Way, Bermondsey, London, SE1 5WS drawingroom.org
Instagram: @drawingroomlondon
Drawing Room is part of Tannery Arts CIO, a charity comprising the studio provider, Tannery Arts, and the public gallery which, as the name suggests, makes room for drawing. The gallery was founded by curators Mary Doyle, Kate Macfarlane and Katharine Stout on a pop-up basis in 2000. They obtained a space in Dalston – when Rachel Whiteread moved out of her Tannery Arts studio – in 2002. Several locations followed around London, always linked to the provision of artists’ studios, before the Bermondsey site opened in 2023.
The leadership has remained remarkably consistent, with Doyle and Macfarlane still co-directing a programme which takes a broad view of drawing as a means to ‘help us understand ourselves, each other and our world’. Together with themed group shows, Nicola Tyson, Marc Bauer and Donna Huddleston have had notable solo shows with a straightforward focus on drawing. Yet the medium can become sculptural, as in Emma MacNally’s 2023 installation; relate to film, as with Hardeep Pandhal in 2025; or – like my illustration – be equally classifiable as painting. A regularly popular exhibition is that associated with the biennial fund-raising auction. The 2026 edition is currently on view, with over 300 A4 drawings donated by artists on view – bidding starts on 9 June at £400, making it a potentially affordable entry point for collecting. Here, for example, is a work from Norwegian artist Vibeke Slyngstad’s ‘Shuafat’ series: a seemingly innocuous slice of nature given a charge by the place it depicts: abandoned land near a refugee camp in East Jerusalem for which planning permission to build houses has been repeatedly denied. It’s one of plenty of interestingly different plant-inspired works among the 300-odd on view: you can see six more on my Instagram.
Paul Carey-Kent selects a ‘Gallery of the Month’, a ‘Show of the Month’, a ‘Work of the Month’ and a ‘Book of the Month’ for his weekly column in FAD.
A collection of previous gallery columns, ‘Paul’s Galleries To Go’, is available from FAD.
