Tracey Rose
Drawing Practice (2012/2013)
Portrait for a Young Black Man, 2013
Lala, 2013
Super Sometimes: Life In The Under Ground, 2012
From 2012 to 2013 Rose lived in Berlin whilst undertaking the DAAD artist residency. During this trip, in October 2012, her son Lwandle was born. As well as creating several video and performance works, Rose drew constantly through her pregnancy and the early months of her son’s life. Despite being best known for her videos and performances, Rose considers drawing to be the central core of her practice. All her works, in all media, are first extensively drawn out on paper. Many of these preparatory drawings become works in their own right.
Portrait for a Young Black Man is a crucial work on paper for Rose. Created in 20 panels of identically sized paper, it is the clearest possible demonstration of her style of draughtsmanship: seemingly chaotic yet minutely mapped out, layered with text, speech, prose, and poetry, and coming together as an infinite clash and marriage of forms and dreams. But for Rose the most vital element of the work is the collaboration with her son, whose own early draughtsmanship is featured prominently across the span of panels and who has, since Day One, made work with his mother as A1.
Lala, 2013, and Super Sometimes: Life In The Under Ground, 2012, were both also created in Berlin and Lala is Rose’s first portrait of her son, writ large and acting as both a pure, observing eye and guardian over this key period in Rose’s drawing practice.