Drawing in my dead neighbour’s flat and how my sketchbooks held me and my shame

As part of my practice-based research, I spent over fourteen months drawing in my dead neighbour’s flat. That these drawings were all made in sketchbooks is key, as is the fact that they, and the drawings in them, are the work entire. This reflective report attempts to make sense of the pivotal role these sketchbooks played in this research. Referring to Derrida’s theories on the ‘underside’ of a drawing, I discuss the physicality of my sketchbooks and their effect on the event of drawing, the drawings themselves and their containment of space; this is an interiority that mirrors the flat where they were made. Jonathan Jones writes of Hockney’s sketchbooks as ‘his true home’, a suggestion that, as with Bachelard’s notion of the house as a space ‘that shelters daydreaming’, such books are a safe, yet liberating, place in which to draw. But what if a home becomes, as with my neighbour’s flat, a signifier of death, one that reduces the artist and her drawings to the notion of what Kristeva called the ‘abject’. Here, the sketchbook can become a harbourer of shame.