Shared tastes in David and Liza Dimbleby exhibition in Eastbourne

Journalist and broadcaster David was approached to create the exhibition to mark his standing down as gallery chairman after ten years. Daughter Liza, artist and writer, was the perfect complement in the task.

Liza explains: “The idea was Joe Hill’s idea (as Towner director). He just had the idea that with dad retiring as chairman we should come along and curate a show. We thought it would be maybe a couple of weekends’ work and let's see but then it became something that just grew and grew. We got the go-ahead in January and started asking for works in February so really it has been just nine months which is very quick really.

“I teach at the Royal Drawing School in London and I am an artist. I have had group shows and I have curated student shows and so when something like this came up I just had to jump in. I had been thinking about drawing for almost 40 years and I had been teaching drawing for 20 years and dad and I had always talked about drawing. He has always drawn. He would take a sketchbook on holiday and we would draw together. He was the parent I would go to for drawing and it was a bond between us. As I became an adult we would go to exhibitions together. At the table the conversation was about politics and so on but for us art allowed us a deeper kind of language.

“For this exhibition we had the Towner collection to start with,” Liza says, and discovering works by Andrzej Jackowski and Ken Kiff gave significant encouragement. “We went to Andrzej’s studio where we looked at his work and for some artists we did more than one studio visit.”

Part of the enjoyment was the fact that Liza and her father actually don't differ much in their tastes: “That's why I agreed to do it. Politically we might have a lot of arguments but usually we don't over art. We were quite together in what we were looking for and what we are drawn to, and I'm always very impressed with the things that might not seem his kind of thing, some pretty weird symbolic drawings perhaps, but he really, really relates to them and can see what is going on and that's why it works so well between us.”

Retaining the overall picture of the exhibition was key: “I kept thinking that it was slightly like making a drawing. You are having to work at speed in terms of making the connections with the galleries and the lenders but you are also working in the dark because you can't see what the finished thing will be. You've just got to trust in it and keep going and then suddenly you get a coherence.”

Seeing the exhibition now in situ brings confirmation: “It is very exciting. And I loved doing the hanging with the technical teams. I've been living with all these images on my computer for a long time and arranging them and rearranging and I was thinking that I might have got jaded with them but absolutely not.”

Drawing the Unspeakable features a wide range of artists including David Bomberg, Barbara Hepworth, Madge Gill and James Gillray, drawn both from the Towner Collection and from other collections such as the British Museum, Bethlem Museum of the Mind and Ben Uri Gallery and Museum. The works straddle both modern and contemporary artists including Denzil Forrester, Emma Talbot, Ansel Krut and Emma Woffenden. The Towner works are mainly chosen from drawings in the Collection such as Dennis Creffield, Study for The Resource of Loneliness, 1978, Elisabeth Frink, Drawing for Harbinger Bird, 1960 and Eric Ravilious, Three Brothers, undated.

Numbering more than 100 works, the exhibition draws on the intensity of human experience, a translation of an event or moment specific to each artist. These challenge the conventions of speech; disasters, war, displacement, and destruction, mental illness, grief, loss, dreams, memories and imagining. Accompanying the drawings will be a written dialogue between David and Liza, from their respective viewpoints as journalist and artist, and as father and daughter.