Drawing, by Joyce Camilleri celebrates what the artist herself identifies as the timeless nature of drawing—a recognition that drawing occupies a unique position in the hierarchy of artistic practices.
Joyce Camilleri describes her drawings as sites of a complete incompleteness—a paradoxical state where the works achieve wholeness through strategic omissions and deliberate fragmentations. Her practice represents the convergence of visual perception, technical skill, and gut instinct, creating images that exist in the seamless tension between presence and absence, revelation and concealment. In an era where digital technologies increasingly mediate our relationship with image-making, Camilleri’s commitment to the immediate, physical act of drawing reasserts the primacy of embodied knowledge and the haptic intelligence of the hand.
Central to Camilleri’s methodology is a process of analytical deconstruction that strips the figure from its surface appearance—what she describes as the very flesh—to expose the underlying architectural structure of human forms. This process of representation is not intended as a mere anatomical figuration in the traditional sense, but rather an investigation into how the human form occupies and articulates space—an approach that recalls the virtuous concept of disegno, where drawing functions simultaneously as a tool of observation and a mode of intellectual inquiry.
The artist works from the inside out, beginning with the skeletal structure and proceeding to the muscular shell that gives the body its designed geometry and spatial presence. This structural foundation gradually accumulates visual information through a selective process of inclusion and exclusion, where elements are rendered with specificity and intention while others remain deliberately unresolved or absent altogether. This methodology creates a visual composition that prioritises essential form over superficial detail, allowing viewers to engage more actively in the construction of the image through their own perceptual participation.
The incompleteness of Camilleri’s figures is a deliberate aesthetic and conceptual mode of enquiry. By refusing to fill in every contour, and leaving areas of the body unresolved into the white void of the paper surface she creates an immediate encounter with works that acknowledge both the materiality of the drawing surface and the temporal process of its making. The viewer’s eye is prompted to complete the figure and trace connections between the rendered forms.
In this sense, Camilleri’s choice of charcoal as her primary medium is significant beyond its historical associations with academic drawing practice. Charcoal possesses unique material properties that align perfectly with her conceptual concerns: it is simultaneously precise and imprecise, capable of producing sharp, definitive lines as well as atmospheric veils of tone. It can be easily manipulated, erased, smudged, and layered, making it a versatile medium for her investigative and process-oriented approach to image-making.
Drawing by Joyce Camilleri runs from 29 September to 24 October 2025 at Jo Borg Gallery. It engages with the dual nature of drawing, as it values drawing’s aesthetic qualities rooted in the beauty of line, the subtlety of tonal values and the tension expressed by gesture. Alongside, it underscores drawing’s function as a tool to rethink, relate and revisit the collectively seen and the personally perceived, thus positioning drawing as a significant contemporary artistic practice.
Jo Borg Gallery 