Deanna Petherbridge (born 1939) is an artist, writer and curator. Petherbridge's practice is drawing-based (predominantly pen and ink drawings on paper), although she has also produced large-scale murals and designed for the theatre. Her publications in the area of art and architecture are concerned with contemporary as well as historical matters, and in latter years she has concentrated on writing about drawing. The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice was published June 2010 and curated exhibitions include The Quick and the Dead: Artists and Anatomy, 1997, Witches and Wicked Bodies, 2013. She celebrated a retrospective exhibition of her drawings at Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester (2 December 2016 – 4 June 2017) accompanied by the monograph Deanna Petherbridge: Drawing and Dialogue, Circa Press, 2016.
Life and career
Petherbridge was born in Pretoria, South Africa. She attended Pretoria High School for Girls and obtained a degree in Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand. After a post-graduate year teaching in the department she emigrated to the UK in 1960. In 1967 she acquired a house on the island of Sikinos dividing her studio practice for many years between London and Greece and after 2003 between London and Italy with a studio in Umbria (2004–2015).
After early years as a painter, producing soft-sculpture and sometimes employing anti-war imagery, Petherbridge turned to monochromatic pen and ink drawing as her primary medium in the 1970s. Studies of Islamic art and architecture, vernacular building and historical fortifications made during early travels in Europe, the Maghreb and Middle East were the basis of early exhibitions of geometric drawings; later Hindu temple architecture, ruins and vernacular structures became an important source for drawings. Her work continues to employ architectonic metaphors and in recent years she has become increasingly interested in reflections on place and landscape. Symbolic representations of war were the subject of the 1980s around the time of the Falkland conflict. These have again become the dominant theme for large multi-panelled drawings, such as The Destruction of the City of Homs, 2016 (Tate, London; on display in Walk Through British Art: 60 Years). In celebration of drawing as a portable, immediate and expeditious medium, Petherbridge has produced work in other venues than her studio while undertaking drawing residencies at Manchester City Art Gallery, UK(1982) Lalit Kala Akademi Studios Calcutta (British Council sponsored) (1986), Monash University, Melbourne, Australia (2003), Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, Pakistan (2005) and the National Art School, Sydney (2011).
Petherbridge's teaching career has included sessional lectureships at the Architectural Association, London (1981–85), the Fine Art departments of the University of Reading and Middlesex Polytechnic (1984–1987). She was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal College of Art (1995 -2001) where she launched the Centre for Drawing Research, the first doctoral programme in drawing in the UK. She was Arnolfini Professor of Drawing at the University of the West of England, Bristol (2002–2006) (appointed Emeritus Professor of Drawing in 2006) and Professor of Drawing at the University of Lincoln (2007–2009). She has supervised a number of PhD students and has delivered lectures, conference and symposium papers internationally. Extended lecture series in the UK include: Contemporary Drawing: Exploring the Unknown, Tate Millbank (January–March 1997), the BBC Radio Three broadcast series The Outline Around the Shadow (10–14 February 1997) and Drawing towards Enquiry at the National Gallery London (February–March 2006) in association with Camberwell College of Arts. She has undertaken extensive lecture tours in other countries, some under the auspices of the British Council for example in India (1985-6 and 1987-8) and South East Asia (1994–95). There have also been lecture tours in Australia (1995, 2003, 2011, 2015), Pakistan (2005), USA (2010), Puerto Rico (2013).
Her public commissions include designing sets and costumes for The Royal Ballet in collaboration with choreographer Ashley Page A Broken Set of Rules (1984) and Bloodlines (1990); and One by Nine (1987), choreographer Jennifer Jackson, Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet. She was commissioned by the Artistic Records Committee of the Imperial War Museum, London (1989). She also undertook a mural on four flours for the curved foyer wall of the Symphony Hall, International Conference Centre, Birmingham (1991).