Sketchbooks as Working Spaces
- Jill Boualaxai
- Jan 13
- 2 min read
Sketchbooks often carry a surprising amount of pressure. They are expected to hold ideas, demonstrate productivity, or act as proof that "work" is happening. Over time, that weight can make them feel strangely performative as something to be kept tidy, coherent, or quietly impressive.
In practice, I am more interested in sketchbooks as places where work is allowed to behave badly. They are not spaces where ideas are neatly planned before being executed elsewhere. Instead, they are places where pages are given permission to be messy, rubbed back, interrupted, and drawn over. They are sites of continuity where ideas can sit unfinished and where connections form slowly. In a sketchbook, nothing needs to resolve.
I have always kept several sketchbooks on the go at once. Projects rarely live in a single volume; instead, ideas drift between them, overlapping, disappearing, and reappearing years later. Because of this, I don’t experience them as linear or chronological records. They are not evidence of progress, but a resource to think with.
This way of working shifts the emphasis away from what is produced and toward what is noticed: recurring shapes, small changes, and ideas that surface gradually. The sketchbook allows uncertainty to remain present not as a problem to be solved, but as a condition that gives the work room to grow. It makes space for a kind of "slow noticing."
Many artists describe sketchbooks as physical extensions of their thought processes. Agnes Decourchelle, for instance, carries multiple books at once some small and immediate, others slow and deliberate, filling them with drawings, weather notes, quotations, and fragments of daily life. She maintains one vital rule: never remove a page, even if the drawing feels like a failure.
What becomes clear through both studio practice and teaching is that development rarely moves in a straight line. Ideas grow by circling the same material, returning to similar forms, or reworking an image with small shifts in attention.
In this context, earlier pages never become obsolete. They stay active, ready to be re-read and re-contextualized by whatever comes later. Sketchbooks are not secondary to a practice; they are integral to it. They are the spaces where ideas learn how to be, before they decide what they might become.
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