Tania Kovats, artist and MA Drawing course leader, has published a book, Drawing Water, which follows her recent solo exhibition Oceans at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, earlier this year. Drawing – both her own and other people’s – is a key part of Kovats’ practice. In 2007, she wrote The Drawing Book (Black Dog, 2007), and she has long been interested in what drawing can do.

Physiographic Diagram, Atlantic Ocean, by Bruce C. Heezen and Marie Tharp, 1957 as featured in Drawing Water by Tania Kovats.

Believing that drawing is a mechanism for exploration as much as a tool for representation, Kovats brings together in the book drawings by map-makers, writers, shipbuilders, whalers, soldiers, sailors, artists, archaeologists, cartographers, scientists, uranographers, engineers and dreamers – a diverse selection united by the sense that in making the drawing they were looking for something.

Spread from Drawing Water by Tania Kovats.

A selection of Kovats’ own drawing and writing anchors the book which attempts to construct, in the artist’s words, ‘a portolan, a chart drawn at sea to guide a sailor from one safe harbour to the next’.

Spread from Drawing Water by Tania Kovats.

Kovats makes drawings, sculpture, installations and large-scale time-based projects exploring our experience and understanding of landscape. She is best known for Tree (2009), a permanent installation for the Natural History Museum in London; and Rivers, an outdoor sculpture in the landscape of Jupiter Artland outside Edinburgh. This new exhibition focuses on her fascination with the sea.

Find out more about Tania’s work at University of the Arts London on herresearch profile.

There are still places available on MA Drawing at Wimbledon. To find out how to apply before the deadline 18th August 2014, please visit our course pages.