Curating the interval: Drawing through the flexi-page sketchbook

This research demonstrates the sketchbook not as a passive container for preparatory drawings but as a curatorial dispositif that actively shapes artistic thought and practice. Drawing from a three-year engagement with a modular, flexi-page sketchbook, the research explores how expanded sketchbook practices operate through reconfiguration, recursion and transmediality. Informed by theories of material thinking (Bolt), curatorial transformation (Groys) and drawing as correspondence (Ingold), the sketchbook is positioned as a micro-curatorial structure – one that stages visual knowledge production through ongoing negotiation with materials, bodies and digital technologies. Two practice-led case studies – Drawing and the Body and The Folding – exhibit how the sketchbook facilitates embodied movement, machinic translation and analogue–digital interplay. Across these episodes, the sketchbook emerges as an active, provisional surface that conditions drawing through proximity, attention and return. Rather than documenting resolved compositions, it generates situated events, holding drawing in a state of becoming. This approach challenges traditional separations between drawing and curation, proposing the sketchbook as a living curatorial field that composes relations rather than displays outcomes. In doing so, the article advances a new understanding of the sketchbook as a space of affective and performative thinking-with.